Steve Bennett stated for the record:
On 3/12/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
My point was that such a shutdown wouldn't happen overnight (unless maybe you pissed off the executive branch of the government enough).
You have obviously never seen provisional liquidators or policemen with warrants in action. There are lots of ways an organisation like Wikimedia Foundation could be shut down a lot faster than overnight. Hopefully none of them will happen :)
Tip for imagination: Policeman with warrant walks in, says "This place is shutting down in the next five minutes, and those servers over there are coming with me".
This might be a violation of WP:BEANS, but...
If that happened, this would be my understanding of the fallback plan:
#A quick topic change on #wikipedia (and #wikipedia-overflow ), along with a post by one of the Foundation members (unless the policeman also had a gag order, which is possible) #A massive influx of people to http://wikiinfo.org (or whatever it's called - the fork run by one of our Arbitrators) #Various wiki pages set up there to discuss new hosting, funding, etc.
#wikipedia could not be taken down unless the policeman was able to get a warrant to take down the entire freenode network, which would set up such massive shock waves that the removal of Wikipedia would be a small thing - freenode hosts a *lot* of projects.
While it might be possible to do a coordinated takedown of the main editable forks of Wikipedia, this would be considerably more trouble.
Also, don't we have database master replication across international borders, specifically, for the toolserver? If we're replicating the database from Florida to Germany, even if the servers in St. Petersberg were taken down, wouldn't the toolserver still work? And as some of our admins are not residents of the USA, couldn't they still work with the remaining servers to reconstruct a non-US based system? Or are we considering Interpol's involvement, and a coordinated set of policemen in multiple countries?
Just pointing this out, Jesse Weinstein