[Wikimediaindia-l] Blocked Wikipedia Page :: Indian Internet Censorship

[Srikanth Lakshmanan]

Hi all,

I was going through the "CIS analysis on DIT response to RTI on blocking"
[1] and found a mention of Sukhbir Singh Badal[2] article was on block list
by DIT on  11.08.2010 by Principal Secretary to Govt. of Punjab.[3] There is
no block currently on the page(atleast by my ISP).

I just did some quick look on history on the page.I could find loads on BLP
tags being hit particularly with severe edit activity around Oct 2010,with
some targeted activity by a single UK based IP editor and many other anons
editing mainly on corruption charges.The same IP user also tried blanking
the page(possibly legally or otherwise threatened else why would someone
adding charges against a person blank the page?) more than once and those
edits were reverted much like any other page blanking. Interestingly there
was nothing apart from templates by bots on the talk page. So this was a
pure case of party crook editors fighting each other, and not even like what
happens on the caste articles(much worse!).

Leaving aside the censorship, since I am not bothered about it much, this
episode suggests more attention is required for WP:INDIA project and lack of
enough volunteers to maintain a large article base of 1.5 lakh+ pages. Yet
another case exposing the "English Wikipedia Community" in India which IMHO
is not doing so well when compared to few other Indic communities. About
time we realize and move from the popular opinion that Indic communities are
the only malnutrition-ed children and English Wikipedia is hale and healthy.

There are people running around proposing Policy guidelines specific to
India (like a guideline for caste, much like BLP) and whole lot of things to
break the "so called" systemic bias. I dont subscribe to that view, but
wondering what can we do help make English Wikipedia a healthy child in
India.

[1]
http://www.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/analysis-dit-response-2nd-rti-blocking
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhbir_Singh_Badal
[3]
http://www.cis-india.org/internet-governance/dit-response-2nd-rti-blocking

-- 
Regards
Srikanth.L
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