On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:24 PM, Matthew Roth <mr...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> We have had contact with the authors of the blog and they have said they > will publish our response to their article, though I'm not sure when or in > what format. > > This is the content of our response: > > "The Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t hold any readers of our projects in any > less regard than others. Our mission is to bring the knowledge contained in > the Wikimedia projects to everyone on the planet. There is no strategic > consideration around how we can make one or another language project more > accessible or readable in one part of the world or another. We do not have > control over how a national government operates its censorship system. We > also do not work with any national censorship system to limit access to > project knowledge in any way. > > It is worth noting the blog post makes some incorrect assumptions about > Wikimedia culture - including incorrect titling of some Wikimedia > Foundation staff (e.g. Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the > Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia -- Wikipedia > is written by tens of thousands of volunteers and has no director and no > hierarchy of editors). There is also an incorrect assertion that Jimmy > Wales has a direct role in working with our staff in making changes to core > infrastructure. Of course Jimmy plays a role in the conversation, but he is > participating in the conversation along with anyone else from the volunteer > editor community. > > On the larger topic, the implementation of HTTPS by default across all > Wikimedia sites for all readers and users is non-trivial, and a > conversation is ongoing within the Wikimedia Foundation and within the > community about how we might make this possible. We do have plans to > eventually enable HTTPS as the default, but it's difficult and we're taking > steps toward this goal over time. > > Our first step is to force HTTPS for logged-in users. The next step will be > to expand our SSL cluster and to do some testing on a wiki-by-wiki basis > with anonymous HTTPS. At some point later we'll attempt to enable HTTPS for > anons on all projects. Then we'll look at enabling HSTS, so that browsers > know they should always use HTTPS to access our sites. > > We've only had proper native HTTPS for about a year and a half. We > attempted to force HTTPS by default for logged-in users last month and > rolled it back. We'll be attempting this again soon. So, it's something > we're actively working on. We've also hard-enabled HTTPS on all of our > private wikis and have soft-enabled HTTPS on a single wiki (Uzbek > Wikipedia), when it was requested by the volunteer editor community there." > > > Great response, which makes it clear that there is no politically biased motives here, just techinical issues. I hope they will be publishing it in some sort of decent form, though unfortunately the damage is generally never restored, it might go a long way. On a tiny side note: Is calling non logged in users on official communications a good idea? I've always found it to be sounding quite denigrating. > > > > On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:50 AM, shi zhao <shiz...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > https://upload.wikimedia.org also blocked > > Chinese wikipedia: http://zh.wikipedia.org/ > > My blog: http://shizhao.org > > twitter: https://twitter.com/shizhao > > > > [[zh:User:Shizhao]] > > > > > > 2013/6/7 Benjamin Chen <bencmqw...@gmail.com>: > > > Hi, > > > > > > Since 31 May, China's Great Firewall has blocked the HTTPS connection > to > > all language versions of Wikipedia, by blocking port 443 on two of our > IPs. > > I was also told that service to Wikimedia Commons may be affected. Other > > projects, such as en.wikisource are not affected by this block (but they > > may still be subjected to keyword censoring on HTTP). > > > > > > Compared to the previous short-lived half-day block, this time the > block > > has been in place for a week and as usual no one knows if it will last > for > > long. > > > > > > Here is an article that has some explanation, some comments, and > (their) > > opinions and suggestions for the Foundation. > > > > > > > > > https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jun/wikipedia-drops-ball-china-not-too-late-make-amends > > > > > > Regards, > > > > > > Benjamin Chen / [[User:Bencmq]] > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > Wikimedia-l mailing list > > > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikimedia-l mailing list > > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l > > > > > > -- > > Matthew Roth > Global Communications Manager > Wikimedia Foundation > +1.415.839.6885 ext 6635 > www.wikimediafoundation.org > *http://blog.wikimedia.org/* > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l