Dear fellow Wikimedians, please sit back for a moment and ponder the following,
For those of us not resident in the US, it has been genuinely alarming to see highly respected US government archives vanish overnight, reference websites go down, and US legislation appear to drift to whatever commercial interests have the loudest current political voices. Sadly "populism" is happening now, and dominates American politics, driving changes of all sorts in response to politically inflated and vague rhetoric about "security" and "fakenews". It is not inconceivable that a popularist current or future US Government could decide to introduce emergency controls over websites like Wikipedia, virtually overnight.[1][2][3][4] The question of whether the Wikimedia Foundation should have a hot switch option, so that if a "disaster" strikes in America, we could continue running Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons from other countries has been raised on this list several times over many years. The WMF and its employees are heavily invested in staying in Silicon Valley, and that will stay true unless external risks become extreme. However, there has never been a rationale to avoid investing in a Plan B. A robust plan, where the WMF can switch operations over to a hosting country with a sufficiently welcoming with stable national government and legislation, that our projects could continue to meet our open knowledge goals virtually uninterrupted and without risk of political control. A Plan B would ensure that if the US Government started to discuss controlling Wikipedia, then at least that published plan would be a realistic response. If they tried doing it, we could simply power off our servers in the USA, rather than compromise our content. If anyone knows of committed investment in a practical WMF Plan B, it would be reassuring to share it more widely at this time. If not, more of us should be asking about it, politely, persistently but perhaps less patiently than indefinitely. :-) Links: 1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46739180 2. http://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/research/updates/populism 3. https://www.cnet.com/news/obama-signs-order-outlining-emergency-internet-control "... this order was designed to empower certain governmental agencies with control over telecommunications and the Web during natural disasters and security emergencies." 4. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/presidential-emergency-powers/576418 "The president could seize control of U.S. internet traffic, impeding access to certain websites and ensuring that internet searches return pro-Trump content as the top results." 5. Bizarro, as used in the title of this email: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarro_World Thanks, Fae -- fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
