On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 12:55 AM, David Cuenca Tudela <dacuetu(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi Eileen,
Thanks for the follow up and for the nice letter that you wrote to the
Turkish Minister. There is something I do not understand about Turkey's
block and maybe you (or somebody else) could offer some insights about it.
Apparently the ban was issued because it was felt that Turkey was
misrepresented in some articles. My question is, why didn't they block only
the offending articles (as they did in the past with other articles)
instead of the whole site?
Regards,
David
One of the effects of Wikipedia's HTTPS-only policy is that ISPs, the
Turkish government, and other parties who may be monitoring traffic can't
see the contents of the traffic – they can only see a connection between
your machine and "wikipedia.org". The option to selectively block traffic
doesn't exist because they can't see what that traffic even is.
So why not allow HTTP-only connections if it gives the Turkish government
the option to block the articles it wants and letting the others through?
Political implications of that aside, the result is that a user couldn't
really guarantee what they were reading was Wikipedia. Which is to say, the
policy of only allowing access to Wikipedia over a secure connection is how
Wikipedia guarantees that you are actually reading Wikipedia and not
Wikipedia plus injected propaganda or injected advertisements or what have
you.
----
James Hare
Associate Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
https://wikimediafoundation.org