this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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They should have just blocked India.
Censoring factual articles globally is an extremely bad precedent to set for yourself.
Indians still deserve their information
You can't give a deranged dictatorship global censorship authority.
That keeps the entire planet from access to information.
not sure it'd be better if they wrote censorship software to protect articles based on geolocated IP for this
there's still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International#Litigation_against_other_organisations
They already have the capability to block content locally.
There isn't a worse option than allowing a government to globally block an article.
If by "They" you mean Wikipedia, they don't. Contempt of court risks excluding all Indian editors and readers from using Wikipedia along with hefty fines.
Yes, they do. They've done it in the past.
It literally doesn't matter what Indian courts rule. Being banned from India is orders and orders of magnitude more acceptable than blocking a single article anywhere else on the planet. It single handedly eliminates all of their credibility.
India isn't capable of enforcing fines against an organization that doesn't operate in their country and there's no chance a US court will enforce such an unhinged judgement. They can't be forced to pay.
could you link to examples of the past?
Information is the power behind revolutions and popular democracy. I’d be surprised if the WMF didn’t check a web archive before taking down the article. The court case was already all over worldwide news before that anyways. If they took the article down from archives, that’d be a different story.
You serve a website in that country, you operate in that country. What say you about the GDPR?
No, I have no interest in digging through their history. But it's less than trivial to do. Any random no name site can do it in 5 minutes with any source of the geo-mapping information, with virtually no knowledge required. It is not work.
GDPR can do literally nothing but block any site that doesn't have finances under their jurisdiction, and they shouldn't be able to. No one else will enforce their fines for them. It's no different than Russia fining Google more money than exists. You can't just magically rob someone because you're a country.
Could you at least give me some keywords to search?
Firstly, Wikimedia does have many usergroup organizations (i.e. subchapters) in India. And even without that, my point is that Wikipedia can't shut down in India.
They not only can, trivially. They unconditionally must.
It is not possible to ever be a reputable organization ever again if you have to choose between censoring content globally for an authoritarian government and shutting down in that country, and censoring content globally is something they genuinely consider. Open, fact based information is their entire reason for existing.
But the information is already available archived elsewhere? Don't you think the people of India deserve to be educated?
Being available elsewhere is entirely irrelevant. Wikipedia must stand against totalitarian censorship to resemble a reputable organization.
Complying is unforgivable.
Dude, what bad does this do? To the Indian people, to you? The information has already been plastered all over the internet, including archives of said article, which anyone may access at their will and command. You want billions of Indian peoples to suffer and be deprived of intellectual revolution for what, grinding a utopic axe? Ceasing operations in India would do way more damage to Wikipedia's goal.
It sets an absolutely obscene precedent that a government can globally restrict information. Even global terrible actors like Russia and China haven't succeeded at that.
Yes, that precedent is 1000 orders of magnitude more harm than India losing access (which they won't, because the entirety of Wikipedia is open source and would be mirrored in the country instantly. But even if they actually would, it is literally impossible to get anywhere near the harm of the precedent this sets).
Again, the information is still everywhere.
Actually, the Chinese Wikipedia used to have a systemic bias in favor of the CPC before China blocked it, after which the bias was changed.
It's a bit elitist to restrict information—weapons of revolution—to those who know how to find a mirror website. Why don't you survey the Chinese nationals in-person to see if they know how to get on Wikipedia? Plus, to avoid block evasion, no mirrors would be able to edit Wikipedia.
Agree.
Wikipedia is one of the giants that could easily geoblock a country and call it done.
If the general populace of the country in question has a problem with that, they can address it with their government or find alternative ways to access it.
Maybe there is a middle ground to be had that I can't see, but kowtowing to the unreasonable demands of a pushy foreign government is idiotic.