Dear James, your praising of WP0 surely deserves or even needs an appropiated answer, but as I can't see my answering mail to Gerard's input from yesterday published in this mailinglist so I will wait until this "moderated".
When I see that my email with the answer to Gerard is published in the mailinglist I will take the time to explain you why net neutrality is more than you suggest and why we need to be a little bit less starry-eyed when it comes to the reasons why telecoms are behaving sooo nice to Wikipedia. Also I will add some remarks about why a little bit more humbleness from the "we are the knowledge of the world"-fraction would be appropiated in the whole discussion. best regards Jens 2015-04-01 18:37 GMT+02:00 James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com>: > Jens, > > Why do you say net neutrality has anything to do with price? It's about > best-effort delivery of packets without censorship or, for example, > treating packets that say "do you want to join our radical fundamentalist > agnostic cell," the same way as we treat packets that say, "do you want to > subscribe to our newsletter." > > In 1973, the packet switching X.25 systems which resemble today's internet > more closely than the IMP point-to-point testing at the time had no > provisions for packet inspection or "quality of service" adjustments. But > if you didn't subscribe to a database that you might want to access (which > may or may not cost money) then you had no access because if there were no > login credentials then you could tell everyone how to use the database when > it could only handle on the order of dozens of users at a time. What you > want in saying that you think zero rating violates net neutrality is the > MIT open Multics movement, which exists on the internet today in the form > of free and ad-supported hosting services like Wikia. Net neutrality is > about no preferred qualities of packet delivery service, because those > are best handled by adaptive rate coding at the application layer, which is > what the WMF causes the implementation of when they contract with cell > carriers to allow access to Wikipedia content for no charge. The fact that > Wikipedia is civilization's best summary of accumulated knowledge so far is > the reason why carriers are willing to provide the transmission power to > their users at no charge in areas where they still ordinarily compete on a > per-bit fee. That is an economic application design choice that has nothing > to do with packet delivery choices. > > Similarly, in the 1860s the Hayes printing telegraph ticker tape had no > restrictions on who could send a transmission or what it's content might > be, and in cases of congestion, the operator noticing a collision first > would back off, and the other would re-transmit in an egalitarian > fashion, but the data you sent would obtain a response in proportion to the > amount the recipient was being paid. > > Wikipedia Zero is a great program and I hope something like Wikiversity > Zero assessments will be how hundreds of millions of people learn new facts > pertinent to their lives and helpful to them in ten years. With adaptive > instruction coupled to Wikipedia Accuracy Review, I believe that such a > system will support the transition from creating new articles to > maintaining existing content. I hope both the WMF and the WEF support this > effort, because if the WEF was paying for it, it would likely not influence > the safe harbor provisions protecting the WMF from legal liability due to > inaccuracies. I am sad when dictatorships use Wikipedia Zero for propaganda > purposes, but I am not sure how much of a problem that is relative to the > advantages. > > Best regards, > James Salsman > > > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
