[Foundation-l] and what if...

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

> Any society considering a Great Firewall of any sort is neither
> democratic nor open, whether or not they periodically hold votes on
> exactly who should implement bad ideas. We should not in any way
> acknowledge or respect such, though we should help those who live
> there and encourage and assist them in circumvention.
>
> --
Well, here comes a real life story. Several days ago, someone on ru.wp
village pump drew the attention of the community to the existence of a
userbox "This user denies Holocost". I speedily deleted the userbox (it
has been used on a number of user pages), since the Holocost denial is
illegal in a number of European countries and constitutes a criminal
offense, and I was afraid that the access to ru.wp will be blocked in
these countries. However, the community has explicitly chosen to ignore
the issue: Any userboxes are currently allowed provided they do not break
the laws of the state of Florida. When I realized that I basically broke
the rules trying to obey the law, I restored the userbox (it has been
later removed by another sysop, and the discussion is still going and will
most probably result in an arbitration case against us), but the issue is
still there. (Note that this does not concern the content, only the
design).

On the other hand, obviously we can not obey all the laws in all
countries. For instance, in Iran LBGT topic are prohibited, and following
this logic we need to remove all LGBT articles from all language editions,
most notably from fa.wp, and content removal clearly contradicts the WMF
goals.

Cheers
Yaroslav