[Wikimania-l] Wikimania 2008 will happen in Alexandria, Egypt

[David Strauss]

Cary Bass wrote:
> The Jury for Wikimania 2008 bids have met and are pleased to announce
> that Wikimania 2008 will be held in Alexandria, Egypt.

I'm offended that the desire to have Wikimania hop around the globe
(rotation) trumps the egregious history Egypt has with LGBT and other
civil rights (local laws). While visitors to Egypt are certainly not at
the same risk, I refuse to spend any money in a country that -- as
recently as 2004 -- sentenced someone to 17 years of prison and two
years of hard labor for posting a personal ad on a gay website[1]. A
blogger was imprisoned in 2007 for four years for "insulting Islam and
defaming the President of Egypt."[2] Jimmy Wales even attended the
Amnesty conference denouncing the censorship. No legal or cultural
reforms since give me confidence that the situation has improved.

Wikimedia and its projects have an abundance of people from marginalized
groups and political advocacy organizations participating at every
level. A place that persecutes, censors, and prosecutes such groups
under the banner of snuffing out "Satanism" is not a location that
affirms the pluralism and intellectual freedom of Wikimedia.

People raised these objections early in the bidding process, but I have
yet to see a response that extends beyond the immediate safety of
conference attendees. (And even those responses failed to address the
danger for transgender and transsexual community members.) Even if we
don't risk anything ourselves, we should care about more than our own
safety: where we hold a conference shows what we consider acceptable.

The "points" system that arrived at this decision strikes me as shallow
and inhuman, a failed attempt at giving the process a veneer of
objectivity. With arbitrary categories of equal weight, why should
anyone expect it to yield a good result? Even then, all the public sees
is a bunch of numbers without justifications or accountability. When I
buy a car, I don't create the categories "exterior color," "interior
color," "CD player," and "starts up" with equal weight, yet "social
areas" weighed equally with "local laws" in the bidding process. How
useful are these "social areas" to the parts of our community whose
social activities, even appearance, include aspects that would be
dangerous in public Egyptian life? How many "points" is their freedom worth?

Alexandria was once distinguished as being the site of the Great
Library, but the Egypt of today has more in common with the society that
burned the library than the one that built it. Don't expect to find me
at Wikimania 2008 Alexandria.

Sincerely,
David Strauss

[1] http://www.gaymiddleeast.com/country/egypt
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6724531.stm

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