> Any society considering a Great Firewall of any sort is neither > democratic nor open, whether or not they periodically hold votes on > exactly who should implement bad ideas. We should not in any way > acknowledge or respect such, though we should help those who live > there and encourage and assist them in circumvention. > > -- Well, here comes a real life story. Several days ago, someone on ru.wp village pump drew the attention of the community to the existence of a userbox "This user denies Holocost". I speedily deleted the userbox (it has been used on a number of user pages), since the Holocost denial is illegal in a number of European countries and constitutes a criminal offense, and I was afraid that the access to ru.wp will be blocked in these countries. However, the community has explicitly chosen to ignore the issue: Any userboxes are currently allowed provided they do not break the laws of the state of Florida. When I realized that I basically broke the rules trying to obey the law, I restored the userbox (it has been later removed by another sysop, and the discussion is still going and will most probably result in an arbitration case against us), but the issue is still there. (Note that this does not concern the content, only the design).
On the other hand, obviously we can not obey all the laws in all countries. For instance, in Iran LBGT topic are prohibited, and following this logic we need to remove all LGBT articles from all language editions, most notably from fa.wp, and content removal clearly contradicts the WMF goals. Cheers Yaroslav _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
