[Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia

[Austin Hair]

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 2:46 PM, Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:
> There seems to be a situation developing at Italian Wikipedia related to a
> local law that would infringe neutrality on Wikipedia. The discussions even
> mention a possible blackout/lockdown in reaction.

Currently, anything I try to access at itwiki gives me the standard
vector template with an empty green bar at the top.[0] If I were to
take anything away from this as a casual reader, it would be
"Wikipedia è rotto."

It's a shitty law. I don't think anyone on this list disagrees. This
morning I read up on the Amanda Knox case for the first time, and it
seems that the Italian system of law has a lot to answer for. (I
think, anyway—my first source for information on Italian law was just
made unavailable to me.)

Let's say that I'm an American, and I'm studying Italian in memory of
my late godparents, Grandma Jan and Papa Joe Giacinto,
second-generation immigrants who frequently spoke Italian around the
house during my childhood. Or I'm one of over one million people in
the U.S. who speak Italian at home, or I'm from Switzerland, or I'm...
well, you get the idea. We're supposed to be about free access to
knowledge, and because 40 angry people said so, I'm only able to
access the Italian Wikipedia if I download a weeks-old database dump,
set up MySQL, Apache, and MediaWiki, and host my own server?

A strike means you stop working. If you want to stop editing, so be
it. itwiki is going a step further, however, and undeniably hindering
"a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum
of all knowledge."

All this because of a proposed law in one country, not mutually
exclusive with the language. If San Marino were to pass such a law,
would we be here?

Austin

[0] http://austinhair.org/itwiki.png