Wikimedia Foundation confirms, and bemoans, Pakistan ban The Wikimedia Foundation released a statement on Friday confirming that, according to internal traffic reports, Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects are no longer accessible to users in Pakistan. The Foundation's post came two days after Pakistan's Telecommunications Authority (PTA) threatened bans if Wikipedia did not censor …
And if your government is preoccupied with "sacriligious" web pages, you live in a country I would avoid.
Things that are sacriligious should literally not be hidden, that way the People can educate themselves and form their own opinion.
But of course, a backwards dictatorship is not interested in an educated population - they just want obedient citizens.
Not like our enlightened Western cultures, who just want obedient consumers.
No, everyone can form their own opinions. Literally any opinion they can think of. That includes opinions which are clearly false (like logical impossibilities), if they wish.
Of course, telling other people your opinion may have consequences. Particularly if your opinion conflicts with science or logic or if those others have opinions which disagree with yours.
Of course, as human beings are a social species, your opinions matter, and have consequences. Telling people your opinion may cause others to laud and cheer you, or they may dislike or even despise you and break off contact with you. That is how society works, and how all progress is made.
"No, everyone can form their own opinions. Literally any opinion they can think of."
Oooh, I would love to see an academic paper discussing that... Given that your thoughts and opinions are formed from the summary experiences of your life and upbringing until that point, I really believe some people simply cannot see the flaws in their own opinions.* I mean, I really believe that what I'm writing now is based on logical, rational thought processes but who know what historical "corruption" lurks in my synapses...
* See the majority of the Russian general population for current examples...
"A block of Wikipedia in Pakistan denies the fifth most populous nation in the world access to the largest free knowledge repository"
That somehow seemed wrong to me and I had to verify online (ironically, on Wikipedia) that Pakistan is indeed the 5th most populous country in the world. Even after verifying it somehow seems wrong.
"If it continues, it will also deprive everyone access to Pakistan's history and culture"
Do the Wikipedia foundation know themselves how Wikipedia works???
I think the point the Foundation were making was....because Pakistan has a large number of regular contributors to their articles...blocking Wikipedia in that country will mean that Pakistani cultural articles will no longer receive the updates and editing that made them valuable.
So the ban does hurt both ways. People in Pakistan can't read Wikipedia, but they also can't write to it.
My point was that articles about Pakistan can still be read by anyone else. So might not be up to date if only people outside of Pakistan can update it*, but the vast majority of Wikipedia articles are not that time-sensitive ie it will be mostly fine to go unupdated for a couple of years
*I assume there are a couple of people in Pakistan that can operate a VPN
While clearly "blasphemy" is a victimless crime, and I'm pretty sure this is more to do with Pakistan's leaders using censorship to hold on to power rather than any more noble aim, I am at the same time slightly sympathetic to their approach. If a website is showing illegal* information, trying to hide behind "we don't write it, it's our users" is not IME a valid position. I wouldn't have any sympathy for YouTube trying to use the same reasoning as an excuse not to remove, say, child porn - so why should anyone accept it from Wikipedia?
*for some value of "illegal"
Well, a reasonable starting position is that websites should not have to remove material which is not illegal in their own country.
Websites should only be subject to the laws of the companies in which they operate. If Wikimedia Foundation wishes to have a company in Pakistan it would need to be subject to Pakistan laws. If not then Pakistan should not be attempting to interfere with it.
That doesn't work though. There's too many things that aren't illegal in other countries.
Eg. certain countries ban certain topics - eg in the UK we ban any site that is engaged in "piracy". Certain speech is illegal here (eg. hate speech, threats etc), but in the USA such speech is much less restricted due to the first amendment.
So, such a rule would be rather limiting.
I disagree - I think it does work.
Of course, it means things that are illegal in country X but not in country Y will be available to people in country X by using the Internet. Including some things that my own country bans, with my support.
But that is, in my opinion, better for the world than the alternative. Countries' laws should stop at their own borders. The most obviously bad things are illegal in all countries. For the rest, laws stop at borders.
WP is literally just a badly edited selection of web search results - many entries are simply copied directly form other sites. The only useful part of a WP page is generally the links at the bottom and they're only useful because search engines artificially boost WP pages so far up the rankings that the original source material is generally hard to find.
So, banning WP has zero effect on any sort of material being on the web. In fact, if the local search engines stop pushing WP, you've probably made it easier to find "blasphemous" material.
So, what you're saying is, you don't actually use the site and haven't any idea how it works?
Wikipedia has a basic rule - everything needs to to have a citation from reliable publications. Hence "Citation Needed" being a common refrain.
There was a study comparing Wikipedia with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the result was that they 2 were on par with each other for accuracy - with each having 4 errors.
You only have to look at the last few years and see the wailings about 'mis' and 'dis'-information and how much of an existential threat someone saying something that goes against the current minority and media pushed narrative is to society.
We've moved to a system dominated by a dogma that is akin to a religion.
> The Register notes Pakistan has banned TikTok at least four times and in April 2021 Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Telegram were cut for four hours. YouTube was blocked in the country between 2012 and 2016.
Working as intended. This is how layer 8 learns to handle the capricious nature of the rest of the stack.
Of course, one country's idea of sacrilegious is often another country's idea of gospel truth, and vice versa. So which country gets to decide?
If you're scared of people being exposed to ideas because it might make them question your state mandated belief system, then you're really admitting that you think that belief system is not strong enough to cope with exposure to other ideas.
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