Hoi, We are discussing a tool that is to be implemented WMF wide. There are projects that are utterly different, there are languages spoken in countries where the sheer audacity of printing the historic election communiques of the ruling government can get you killed. They are largely the less and least resourced languages and consequently these projects are comparatively tiny.
There are people I am aware off who want to contribute to Wikinews but it is EXACTLY their need to be outside of their country and to be anonymous that may give them the courage to start doing a journalistic job.. We all now how great our community is at keeping secrets, there are people who insist that everything should be available to them. I am fearful that removing the option for these people to use TOR will kill off what is essential to our goal; bring information to our public..
Even our public figures, people living in the "free world" are harassed, stalked, threatened...Rape, murder, the use of sulphuric acid they are the kind of threats that are issued. This is in my opinion the greatest threat that we face. This threatens our NPOV. For some people safety exists in anonymity but there are people who are loose lipped, who think that the issue is not that dire and who as a consequence will carelessly endanger their fellow wikimedians.
There is a balance between on the one hand the vandals, the sock puppeteers, the insane and on the other hand the people who need the anonymity that TOR can offer. At this moment I am afraid that only one side of the picture has been considered. Thanks, GerardM
On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 7:58 PM, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 8:06 PM, Marco Schuster marco@harddisk.is-a-geek.org wrote:
jayjg schrieb:
I appreciate why someone in China would want to use tor. Would any of that apply to someone in a Western democracy?
Living in a Western democracy doesn't necessarily mean that you can surf the web or use internet services freely, look at all those blocks for Bittorrent, the dozens of blocks for Nazi hosters, and especially the German court decision about YouPorn, which actually led to >2 million websites being invisible by Arcor customers; they can only be helped through proxys (though I don't think watching porn via proxys is good).
As has been pointed out, while porn sites may be blocked, Wikipedia rarely (if ever) is, so the analogy fails.
And please also do not forget that some people indeed care about their privacy - what many people unfortunately do not, and so freedom passes more and more away.
Wikipedia is an on-line encyclopedia, not an experiment in internet anonymity. If it were, then we would discard all checkuser logs immediately. We give editors a reasonable level of anonymity, a balance that provides the most net benefit to *Wikipedia*. Allowing TOR open proxies to edit (why TOR and no others, I wonder?) has an overall net dis-benefit to Wikipedia.
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