<quote name="MZMcBride" date="2013-08-21" time="00:23:04 -0400">
Ryan Lane wrote:
Maybe what we're doing is appeasement, but realistically we have no political power against China. The editors from mainland China had a discussion with some of us at Wikimania and they said that Wikipedia is basically unknown in China because Baidupedia is what shows up in the search results and Wikipedia does not. They actually spend a great deal of time trying to make Wikipedia known to readers in hopes of strengthening the editing community. If we were fully blocked again in China, it wouldn't cause any political fuss.
Good to know, thanks. So perhaps the impact will be minimal. If stats are possible, they'd be great. I'm not sure how easy it is to measure users unable to use HTTPS.
We have some preliminary data that we collected over the weekend on the ability of users to access an https resource (zero byte gif hosted on upload.wikimedia). The numbers still only live in a google doc (sorry!), and they have a lot of caveats.
The caveats (really important to read): https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/document/d/1Y2vs8lpevv9PtH_dp3P5hZeK... (one really important caveat is we don't even list countries which had less than 100 requests total, as that would be too much noise in the data.)
https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ams-fyukCIlMdFR... (Be sure not to miss the tabs at the bottom which show you a map view of the data).
As China and Iran are the outliers there, here's a spreadsheet with them zero'd out so you can more easily see the middle gradients: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Agte_lJNpi-OdFJ...
Additionally, to see if any changes have a major effect on the ability of people to log in, we've started parsing out the successful centralauth autentications and will have a nice Ganglia graph tomorrow. We also parsed out some historical data on those going back a week or more to have a better idea of what "normal" is. Our numbers here are "successful logins per hour" which should be a decent metric to watch.
Thanks much to Ori and Dario for working on the HTTPS capability numbers, and Ori and Robla for getting the successful login numbers.
Greg