On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 10:14:48 -0400, Anthony wrote:
On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter
<pute...@mccme.ru> wrote:
The law just passed the third reading without any changes. It has to
be now
signed by the president and will be enforced in the present form on
November
1, 2012.
So is this going to shut down Russian Wikipedia? I still don't see
what the language has to do with anything. The Russians don't have a
monopoly over the use of the Russian language (especially given that
there are countries other than Russia where Russian is widely
spoken).
No, it does not, at least immediately. There is nothing in the law
which is directly dangerous for Wikipedia. The fear is that due to the
absence of intependent courts, some official may want to shut down the
whole Wikipedia because they do not like an article about them or
because they consider it a "conductor of American style of life" or
whatever, it becomes indeed easy, and it would be very difficult if not
impossible to reverse the decision. Btw the law does not specify the
language, so that Russian Wikipedia is certainly not the only WMF
project affected (though the most obvious one).
Cheers
Yaroslav
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