Hello everyone
Thanks for alerting the list to this. Various teams at the Foundation have
been monitoring the situation in Myanmar and continue to do so. While we
are currently still gathering data to better understand what is actually
happening, our initial analysis indicates that the information about a
complete block of Wikipedia is not accurate. We are still seeing traffic to
our servers from various ISPs in the country.
We will send an update once we have enough information.
Best regards,
Jan
==
Jan Gerlach
Lead Public Policy Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
jgerlach(a)wikimedia.org
@pd_w <https://twitter.com/pd_w>
@wikimediapolicy <https://twitter.com/wikimediapolicy>
On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 5:00 PM Alexander N Krassotkin <krassotkin(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Russian Wikinews:
Устроившая переворот в Мьянме хунта заблокировала Википедию
https://ru.wikinews.org/?curid=8842919
We also await official comment from the Wikimedia Foundation.
sasha.
On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 11:09 PM 《求闻》编译组/Qiuwen WMCug
<qiuwen(a)wmcug.org.cn> wrote:
BEIJING, Feb. 20 (Qiuwen) - NetBlocks, the internet freedom advocacy
group,
says Wikipedia was blocked in Myanmar by the
authorities.
NetBlocks confirms "all language editions of Wikipedia" were down in
Myanmar
starting Thursday morning local time. In a tweet
[1], Netblocks said,
this is
"part of a widening post-coup internet
censorship regime imposed by the
military junta."
Netblocks provided additional information in a picture attached to the
tweet,
suggests that they have tested the connectivity
of Wikipedia in English
and
French, Wikidata, and
wikimedia.org, with none of
them accessible. This
may
intimate that it is highly that the Burmese
authorities not only blocked
"all
language editions of Wikipedia," but all
Wikimedia projects, as a whole.
The
picture also suggests that Wikipedia remains
inaccessible across four
different
internet service providers in Myanmar.
It is likely that the Burmese authorities are blocking Wikimedia projects
using the same tactic seen in China and some other countries, which is by
blocking the main IP address Wikipedia and its sister projects uses. All
Wikimedia projects share the same IP address, which makes it an easy
target by
censors to implement a block.
Qiuwen noticed that starting from February 19th, there was a noticeable
increase of edits made from IP addresses that were likely to be used for
VPNs
on Burmese Wikipedia, signaling locals may have
to use VPNs to get onto
Wikipedia already. On Friday evening local time, an administrator posted
a
message on the Village Pump of Burmese Wikipedia,
explaining the use of
"IP
block exemption," a special MediaWiki flag,
similar to rollback and
patrol,
allowing users with the flag to edit from VPNs. A
similar banner was
also set
up, visible on every page of Burmese Wikipedia.
The "IP block exemption"
flag
is widely issued to users of Chinese Wikipedia,
and previously, users of
Turkish Wikipedia, who needed VPNs to access.
Internet blackouts are increasingly common in Myanmar and across the
world.
The military shut down the internet before they
attempted the coup on
February
\1st, and the military authority has blocked or
temporarily blocked
Facebook
and other social media platforms starting
February 3rd. Usages of VPNs
reportedly skyrocketed for locals eager to access blocked websites.
NetBlocks
says the authorities have been implementing an
"internet curfew," as the
internet shut down during the nights.
This also means Myanmar has joined an increasingly bigger club of
countries
that had blocked Wikipedia. Its recent members
include Iran, which
blocked
Wikipedia for around 24 hours in March 2020, and
Venezuela in January
2019.
In countries such as Iran, Internet blackouts
also interfered with the
Wikimedia movement, such as Iran's week-long blackout in November 2019
had
delayed the Wikipedia Asian Month edit-a-thon.
China, the "permanent
member"
of the club, blocked Wikipedia since 2015. It is
not clear whether or
not the
block on Wikimedia projects will be lifted in the
future, similar to
what the
Iranian and Turkish authorities had done.
The Wikimedia Foundation has yet to comment on the block. Myanmar
Wikimedia
Community User Group, the Wikimedia user group
representing Myanmar, has
also
yet to comment. Their Facebook page was last
updated on January 16th, two
weeks before the military coup.
----
Qiuwen is a news service operated by the Wikimedians of Mainland China
user
group[2].
Follow us for the latest Wikimedia news in
greater China.
CC BY-SA 4.0
Follow us on Telegram:
https://t.me/Qiuwen
[1]:
https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/1362814793502097409
[2]:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_of_Mainland_China
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>