On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 8:04 PM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote: > >In general, though, I'd prefer for WMF to move away from what could be > >characterized as appeasement and towards actively resisting censorship > >and monitoring. > > I agree with you and I imagine most developers would agree with you. But > the question remains: do most Wikimedians? > > I think for most Wikimedians, but particularly for Wikimedians in areas > where HTTPS access is restricted, I think there's a general view that > having insecure access over HTTP trumps requiring HTTPS and cutting off > access altogether. While we hope that this situation is inapplicable to > most users, we have to recognize that it's applicable to some percent of > our users. It'd be good to get numbers about how many users we're talking > about and try to better understand what the Wikimedia community thinks is > the best path forward, given the various constraints and consequences. > > There's not a lot of great options for us to actively bypass censorship methods and anything we do will likely result in us being completely blocked by doing it. 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. - Ryan _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
