[Wikimedia-l] Blocking of HTTPS connection by China

[Matthew Roth]

We have had contact with the authors of the blog and they have said they
will publish our response to their article, though I'm not sure when or in
what format.

This is the content of our response:

"The Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t hold any readers of our projects in any
less regard than others. Our mission is to bring the knowledge contained in
the Wikimedia projects to everyone on the planet. There is no strategic
consideration around how we can make one or another language project more
accessible or readable in one part of the world or another. We do not have
control over how a national government operates its censorship system. We
also do not work with any national censorship system to limit access to
project knowledge in any way.

It is worth noting the blog post makes some incorrect assumptions about
Wikimedia culture - including incorrect titling of some Wikimedia
Foundation staff (e.g. Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the
Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia -- Wikipedia
is written by tens of thousands of volunteers and has no director and no
hierarchy of editors). There is also an incorrect assertion that Jimmy
Wales has a direct role in working with our staff in making changes to core
infrastructure. Of course Jimmy plays a role in the conversation, but he is
participating in the conversation along with anyone else from the volunteer
editor community.

On the larger topic, the implementation of HTTPS by default across all
Wikimedia sites for all readers and users is non-trivial, and a
conversation is ongoing within the Wikimedia Foundation and within the
community about how we might make this possible. We do have plans to
eventually enable HTTPS as the default, but it's difficult and we're taking
steps toward this goal over time.

Our first step is to force HTTPS for logged-in users. The next step will be
to expand our SSL cluster and to do some testing on a wiki-by-wiki basis
with anonymous HTTPS. At some point later we'll attempt to enable HTTPS for
anons on all projects. Then we'll look at enabling HSTS, so that browsers
know they should always use HTTPS to access our sites.

We've only had proper native HTTPS for about a year and a half. We
attempted to force HTTPS by default for logged-in users last month and
rolled it back. We'll be attempting this again soon. So, it's something
we're actively working on. We've also hard-enabled HTTPS on all of our
private wikis and have soft-enabled HTTPS on a single wiki (Uzbek
Wikipedia), when it was requested by the volunteer editor community there."





On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:50 AM, shi zhao <shizhao at gmail.com> wrote:

> https://upload.wikimedia.org also blocked
> Chinese wikipedia: http://zh.wikipedia.org/
> My blog: http://shizhao.org
> twitter: https://twitter.com/shizhao
>
> [[zh:User:Shizhao]]
>
>
> 2013/6/7 Benjamin Chen <bencmqwiki at gmail.com>:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Since 31 May, China's Great Firewall has blocked the HTTPS connection to
> all language versions of Wikipedia, by blocking port 443 on two of our IPs.
> I was also told that service to Wikimedia Commons may be affected. Other
> projects, such as en.wikisource are not affected by this block (but they
> may still be subjected to keyword censoring on HTTP).
> >
> > Compared to the previous short-lived half-day block, this time the block
> has been in place for a week and as usual no one knows if it will last for
> long.
> >
> > Here is an article that has some explanation, some comments, and (their)
> opinions and suggestions for the Foundation.
> >
> >
> https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jun/wikipedia-drops-ball-china-not-too-late-make-amends
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Benjamin Chen / [[User:Bencmq]]
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list
> > Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>
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>



-- 

Matthew Roth
Global Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
+1.415.839.6885 ext 6635
www.wikimediafoundation.org
*http://blog.wikimedia.org/*