Wikipedia Blocks Qatar [Updated] 204
GrumpySimon writes "Wikipedia has blocked the entire country of Qatar from editing pages. Whilst the ban is due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, the fact that this belongs to the country's sole high-speed internet provider has the unintended consequence of stopping Qataris from editing the wiki. The ban has raised concerns about impartiality — the majority of Al Jazeera journalists operate out of Qatar, for example. This raises a number of issues about internet connectivity in small countries — what other internet bottlenecks like this exist?" Update: 01/02 13:32 GMT by Z : Jim Wales wrote in the comments that the story is 'completely false'. Either way, the ban has been lifted and anonymous editing is once again possible from Qatar.
IPv6 (Score:4, Informative)
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OT: Qatar is not in the UAE (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar [wikipedia.org]
If you agree that Qatar is not part of the UAE, please tag this story 'notuae' and mod this comment 'Informative' so everyone will see it.
Let's show Qatar that unlike Wikipedia, Slashdot is not a haven of ignorance.
Re:OT: Qatar is not in the UAE (Score:5, Funny)
Says the guy who uses a Wikipedia link to back up his assertions... : p
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Personally, I'd rather have accuracy.
Re:OT: Qatar is not in the UAE (Score:4, Informative)
"All articles must follow our no original research policy and strive for accuracy"
I mean, if accuracy isn't part of their mission then there's no reason that all their articles must strive to be accurate, right?
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If you don't provide a link to the article in question, the situation you describe will continue forever. If you do provide the link then it's possible it will be fixed. It also reduces your credibility significantly to be so vague.
I'm guessing that the article you're referring to is Foreskin [wikipedia.org] which looks reasonably well balanced to me right now.
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Now I can see why you stopped editing Wikipedia, and I'm sure Wikipedia thanks you for it.
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You didn't even bother to challenge what I said other than "I don't have to prove what I said. Generic playground insult."
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Yup; wikipedia is very much like a traditional dead-tree encyclopedia. Not surprising, since that was the basic model from the start. And the acknowledged limitation to "basic" information is why so many wikipedia pages have that list of references and links at the bottom.
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And they never
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You can get lots of information, lots of flame wars on anything even remotely controversial and in the end you have to make up your own mind as to how accurate and unbiased it is.
Atleast wikipedia does cite sources... usually - ho wmuch you trust those sources is another question...
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Re:OT: Qatar is not in the UAE (Score:5, Informative)
Re:OT: Qatar is not in the UAE (Score:4, Funny)
I cant resist to suggest the use of the following tags:
So we can be sure what the story is not talking about. So the article "U.S. Mass Declassified Documents At Midnight" could use the tags !mattingHabitOfPurpleTurtles, !DanceLesson, !FreedomFriesRecipe, !WOWGoldFarming, !KillingOfKittens, !Cthulluh^wd, !takeOverTheWorld^wd, !LOL, ...
What is your favorite nontag?
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!nontag
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Re:OT: Qatar is not in the UAE (Score:5, Funny)
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Ummm, it's a very wealthy country. They have less than a million people, which is why a sole ISP might make sense, but they're not exactly suffering from poverty.
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Qatar not able to afford to upgrade to IPv6? And stuck using Win95?
Uh... respectfully, how did the parent get marked "interesting"? Anyone who's thought about the middle east is well aware that, while it's a small country, "Oil and natural gas revenues enable Qatar to have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world." (CIA World Factbook, 2007).
We seem good at marking Qatar as UAE, and characterizing it as a
I doubt it's a lack of external IPs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IPv6 (Score:5, Informative)
It's a matter of more cables. The recent outages in Asia were exasperated by the lack of redundant routes. You see to save money they only installed the minimum necessary cables as they 'weren't in an earthquake zone'.
--
God is dead - Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead - God
Nietzsche thinks he's a tulip
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well.. (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, according to wikipedia, the correct word is Qatarded, not Qatarese.
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Oddly enough, most are really good at math.
Impressive... (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually a blow AGAINST censorship (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not a bad thing. While the side effect is temporarily drastic, if quatar had multiple ISPS we would not be discussing this at all.
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In the case of Saudi Arabia, that's exactly what happens. The whole country is behind a proxy server (or was, last I heard) and it's difficult to block a single abusive user without locking out everyone. That was my first thought reading this story, but Qatar has a vastly different government than Saudi Arabia does and there seem to be the usual accuracy problems with the summary here so I'll decline to speculate.
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... Qatar has a vastly different government than Saudi Arabia
You are correct in that there is more freedom of expression in Qatar than in Saudi, and the Ministry of Information was abolished in 1996. Unfortunately, QTel has not yet realised [qatar.net.qa] that there is no censorship in Qatar [bbc.co.uk].
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And how about the fact that your administrators block people with non-Western usernames on sight, with no warning and no recourse? Once you're blocked, you can't even try to create another username for 24 hours. I guess we must be vandals and trolls simply because we happened to be born with names in a script unreadable to Western eyes.
Ugh. Apologies, but the mentali
What's so hard about transliteration? (Score:2)
I guess we must be vandals and trolls simply because we happened to be born with names in a script unreadable to Western eyes.
On the Wikipedia designated for the English language, you are expected to contribute text readable by speakers of the English language. What's so hard about picking some transliteration [wikipedia.org] for your username? Even IM-speak [wikipedia.org] would work.
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Wikipedia admins need to learn that this kind of shit tends to piss people off. No wonder you guys are so afflicted by trolls and vandalism.
Wikipedia:Changing username (Score:2)
When you are blocked, you can still post to your user talk page, except in the most exceptional cases. I think administrators can change a non-Latin username [wikipedia.org] on request.
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Look, I'm a big fan of the concept behind Wikipedia, but somewhere along the line, the implementation's gone terribly wrong. Wikipedia's administrators really need to chill out when it comes to throwing out bans like candy. It's as if none of them could even imagine they could ever be mistaken, or that once you've been banned, you have essentially no recourse that doesn't involve crossing your fingers a
Request templates have associated categories (Score:2)
What makes you think that? The template used to make an administrative request places your user page in a category that the administrators check routinely.
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Certainly I was never informed of any such template before giving up and leaving with a bad taste in my mouth. But if things have changed in the intervening months, I'll be relieved to know Wikipedia's at least trying to become friendlier to potential contributors.
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Note that (1) "Be sure that you are logged in to the relevant account. For security reasons, bureaucrats will not effect a name change if the request comes from an unauthorized user or an IP address." and (2) Logging into a blocked account, last I knew, prevents
Hard to block countries (Score:2)
They who make the bed ... (Score:2)
Correction (Score:3, Interesting)
Proxy servers to blame (Score:4, Informative)
If Wikipedia's information on the linked page is correct, the reason that the entire Qatar is blocked, is that it is the ip of a proxy server...
It is common practice for ISP's in countries with limited bandwidth to transparently proxy all HTTP traffic in order to save bandwidth
South Africa's SAIX [wikipedia.org] does the same. However they have several proxy servers doing load sharing, which cause even more problems with sites that associate session information with one's IP. Online games preventing the trading of items by users on the same IP is also problematic.
Sites offering access on an alternative port in addition to 80 would offer a solution.
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IPv6 as mentioned by the poster up top won't solve issues like this. Paying $10/GB of traffic per month is the problem, not address space. Oh and despite what Telkom tells you, it's not that there's too much traffic for their poor transoceanic cables. Currently, just 2 [ic.gc.ca]
Only anon users (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a far lesser issue, it's more accountability than censorship.
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It's telling that Wikipedia's conception of "accountability" and "anonymity" are flawed at such a basic level.
Wikipedia also blocks a Canadian School District (Score:4, Interesting)
yes it is because of vandals (at other schools) but still I cannot do anything and Im not trying to vandalize but only add good content
Re:Wikipedia also blocks a Canadian School Distric (Score:2)
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And this is the way things are supposed to work, according to Wikipedia's admins.
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What makes you think a less restrictive system would be worth the effort to Wikipedia? There are many, many thousands of casual contributors, but only a fairly small number of people with enough interest and ability to serve as moderators. Your individual contribution is insignificant to the project as a whole.
I'm not trying to discourage anyone from editing Wiki. Your contribution is still significant to the people reading it. Just don't expect the project to bend over backwards for you.
Re:Wikipedia also blocks a Canadian School Distric (Score:4, Informative)
summary wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Users can still edit wikipedia throught this proxy by creating an account and logging in.
Creating a wikipedia account only requires a (throw-away) email, and is actually more anonymous, since your IP will not show up in the public logs if you are logged in.
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I am a Wikipedia administrator, and I think this block on IP edits is completely correct. IP edits (edits from users without accounts without accounts) from proxy servers with many misbehaved users should always be blocked.
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While possibly being logged in will allow editing of pages - that may be so for Qatars.
If you block account creation... (Score:2)
Even if the edit is to the account creation log? How are contributors who live in Qatar supposed to create Wikipedia accounts if the country's only ISP's entire IP address space is blocked?
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Some additional info... (Score:5, Informative)
Regarding others blocked, there's Slashdot/Bahrain (Score:4, Interesting)
IT in Qatar (Score:5, Informative)
So, the problem appears to be fixed. Users can now register for accounts. Thank you slashdot front page (Kjkolb [wikipedia.org]) ;)
The problem came from QTel censorship [qatar.net.qa]. Every connection passes through a QTel proxy server, which uses some simplistic rules to determine whether you should be protected from your own surfing habits. If you hit blocked pages too often, your phone rings and when you answer in English you get "I'm sorry, I must have a wrong number. CLUNK." Thus your voice has been recorded for posterity.
The shambles of Qatar's connection might be fixed soon. Q-CERT [qcert.org] has just been set up and (hopefully), someone with a bit of influence will be in charge. It is obvious that a single point of failure for an entire population's internet connection is not sensible, but whether this means a better censorship system or the scrapping of censorship remains to be seen.
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Afterall, each person should be the judge as to what they want to look at or not, right?
Or are they afraid of folks learning about new political ideas? Or *gasp* looking at pornography to entertain themselves harmlessly in the privacy of their own home?
Censorship is such a pointless ultimate abuse of power. And I bet the leaders do it so they can get that warm fuzzy feeling in their t
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You misread the story. Wikipedia isn't blocking reading; they're blocking anonymous edits. People in Qatar can read wikipedia without any blocking. (At least none from wikipedia.) They just can't edit wikipedia content without first identifying themselves.
Remember the story a while back when wikipedia blocked edits coming from the US Congress's address?
So why doesn't Qarta just the stop the spammers? (Score:2)
Please loose the excuses (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't mask it with that or any other excuse. It's not Wikipedia's fault that they have only high speed provider who can't fix a simple problem.
ISP:
Problem: User X is abusing other networks.
Solution: Account is turned off.
Yes it's that easy if laziness weren't involved. This is exactly like those who whine when their network gets listed on an RBL. Where do those who are blocked go? They whine to the RBL or since they, the RBLs, aren't going to listen the world. They should complain to their network provider - it's where the problem is.
Don't write if you don't read (Score:2, Informative)
unintended consequence of stopping Qatarese from editing the wiki
Those from Qatar are Qatari. Plural is Qataris. "Qatarese", while sounding the same, would actually be the language of Qatar, if they did not speak Arabic and such a thing actually existed. This is a classic error made by someone who doesn't read much, or doesn't understand what he reads. At the risk of sounding trite, I will repeat what every professional writer says to every aspiring writer who asks what the best preparation is for writing: read a lot. If nothing else it will give you a grasp of the writ
Re:Don't write if you don't read (Score:4, Funny)
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Still, the -ese suffix applied to a country is usually an adjective, and not a noun unless describing a language itself. You don't say "Fung is a Japanese"... a Japanese what?
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Ok, once I started thinking about it - and looked them up - I realized there are a few asian ones also - not counting Thai :):
Maybe it has to do with age. All of these became countries recently in the 20th century - and most of them in the last 30 years.
CIA Factbook list of all nationalities [cia.gov]
/. does the same thing (Score:3, Informative)
Some Context: Blocking Wikispam (Score:4, Informative)
I can't speak for Wikipedia's spam blocking process, but I operate a Wiki that is well known enough to get a lot of spam. I block that fairly effectively. Seven pieces of true spam have gotten through over the two and a half years since I implemented the first version of my spam blocking, but I had almost half my site overwritten at one point before that, so I take it pretty seriously. I fully understand why many Wiki owners have decided to make their Wikis read only rather than deal with it and why others have resorted to required logons, confirmations of the existence of a human, and other measures. Some useful factoids:
I don't want to make any great claims, at least in part because I don't want to increase the attack frequency on my site or get slashdotted, but my software has been very effective in blocking almost everything that the spammers throw at me. I don't currently block any countries and am reluctant to publicly reveal the rules I use for the blocking, but do block about a dozen IP addresses that have been used enough to suggest that they are directly associated with individual spammers.
Thailand (Score:2)
Thanks,
GerardM
rfc1918 (Score:2, Insightful)
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I'm sorry but NAT is never a good thing since it breaks the peer-to-peer design of the internet, rendering peer-to-peer applications such as VoIP, bittorrent, etc. difficult or impossible to use.
Additionally, RFC1918 addresses are of site-local scope - i.e. they are reserved for use on a LAN. Using them on a WAN is bad since it leads to addressing conflicts with people who are using the networks in their inte
Spam Abuse (Score:2)
If Qatar get's whacked as a nation I don't really care. It's because of their flagrant disregard for the number one problem on the internet today. SPAM.
And it wasn't Qatar that got whacked. It was their only ISP that got whacked. How is this any different from blocking res.rr.com? Answer: It's not. It just happens that they don't have a lot of other ISP choices out there. Too bad.
I have no sympathies for any nation that tops the list of spam abuse and I have no sympathies for ISP's that have no real
This is why anonymous editing is bad (Score:2)
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The most effective server-side solution is keyword blacklisting. User registration is easily bypassed. However, IP blacklisting is also a very good option and has the added benefit of putting pressure on the offending ISP to control the illegal and unethical behavior of its customers.
This is a very good thing (Score:2)
It sucks this has to be done, but there's no other way, short of civil/criminal prosecution, to make them take resp
Qataris not Qatarese (Score:2)
Qatarese is wrong.
This story is completely false. (Score:5, Informative)
Move along, nothing to see.
--Jimbo Wales
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You wrote on the linked Wikipedia page:
A user who claims to be from Qatar has added, below you
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My point is that a headline of "Wikipedia blocks Qatar" is inflammatory and gives people entirely the wrong
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According to Wikipedia's own logs [wikipedia.org], "under 12 hours" is totally inaccurate. A block was put in place on 30 December; then 44+ hours later it was lifted and immediately re-established (the comments suggest that this was removal of the account creation ban); then 8 hours later the block was removed. Anonymous editing
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Slashdot blocks all of Kuwait (Score:2)
Since at least one person in any given population is going to be a real jerk, most of these countries are going to find themselves as second class net participants. The only way to avoid this is for each site to accept only indivi
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Um, we do? Please email us, or have someone email us, if there's an entire country that Slashdot is blocking in some way. I think we provide a contact email address on all our "you've been blocked" messages, but just in case you didn't see one, try pater@slashdot.org. Let us know what the IP is and if there's been abuse, we'll handle it, well, pretty much [slashdot.org] the way Wikipedia did :)
As for not being able to log in, I think that might be something about your ISP. We block anonymous contributions from an IP num
Qatar and many other networks segments (Score:2, Interesting)
"it's true" (Score:2)
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Not so: Qatar formally lifted censorship of the media in 1995 and since then the press has been essentially free from government interference. However, social and political constraints make self-censorship commonplace.
(from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/coun t ry_profiles/791921.stm [bbc.co.uk])
The very reason al-Jazeera is there is because there is no overt censorship.