This just came to my mind: If the policemen removes the servers, doesn't
they break the GFDL?
On 3/12/06, Jesse W <jessw(a)netwood.net> wrote:
Steve Bennett stated for the record:
> On 3/12/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)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
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