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@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@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@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
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
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].
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