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Qatar blocked by Wikipedia?
January 1, 2007 | 2:38 pm
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By Branko Collin
According to a story submission to Slashdot, the state of Qatar has been blocked from editing Wikipedia without registering. This is apparently the result of vandalism emanating from Qatar’s only internet access provider, Qtel. Qatar is home to amongst others the Al Jazeera news broadcaster.
A note on the ubiquity of Wikipedia: while searching the Teleblog for earlier mentions of Wikipedia, it appeared that in the last 100 entries about 2 in 5 mentioned the online encyclopaedia.
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Comments:
Great post, Branko. And it’s no accident why Wikipedia-related links show up so often in my TeleBlog entries, at least. In link target terms, the Wikipedia items provide a MUCH better signal-to-noise ratio than do the raw Google results. I’m not surprised why Jimmy Wales (or is it someone else?) is thinking about a Google rival with social-site elements to help sort through the results.
Happy holidays,
David
Oddly the last few days I’ve been involved in lots of wikipedia matters, and have had this same sense of wikis being all-pervasive. I’ve having mixed feelings about wikipedia these days. Also, I’ll post something about wiki-ish kinds of things soon.
Please do post, Robert! I’m interested in the pros and cons. As I see it, the pros include the S/N I mentioned earlier. What’s more, you can get a quick overview of a topic. The cons are obvious—the risk of inaccuracy and of information tainted secretly by special interests, pranksters or by plain old-fashioned know-nothings. Not all mistakes get caught in a timely way. Still, I suspect that the accuracy rate is much higher than, say, the Britannica would claim for Wikipedia.
Happy holidays,
David
“I’m not surprised why Jimmy Wales (or is it someone else?) is thinking about a Google rival with social-site elements to help sort through the results.”
That would indeed be Jimmy Wales.
Actually, the story is not entirely true. Due to vandalism, a shared IP address was blocked from Wikipedia to stop the offensive edits. Unfortunately, that was the entire set of IP addresses for Qatar. It was quickly corrected, but the media stories never noticed that. They just pounced on “Wikipedia blocks an entire country!”
See the Wikipedia discussion for details.
Kesh, I am afraid I don’t see the difference between what you write and what I wrote. Because of the way internet access is set up in Qatar, Qatar got locked out of editing Wikipedia for a while (at least those who had not registered). The story is pointing out the dangers of monoculture.
The difference is that many of the media reports were phrased as if Wikipedia unilaterally decided to block the entire nation of Qatar after one anonymous user vandalized the site.
What really happened was that Qatar’s policy of running their entire internet connection through a single proxy server meant that blocking one IP blocked everyone in that nation. Many of the news sources were unclear on that, acting as if Wikipedia had simply shut down an entire nation’s ability to edit because of one user.
I apologize if I misunderstood your post, but it wasn’t clear to me you were commenting on monoculture since you only pointed to the Slashdot article.
This is sort of related, since it’s about Qatar’s al-Jazeera, but for the last hour, I cannot do a Google search for the network name (spelt either Al Jazeera or Al-Jazeera) without crashing my browser. I have tried IE7, Maxthon and Firefox, with both spellings, using the Google Toolbar and regular Google, on two different computers (albeit on the same ISP). All other searches are fine, but for the network name, I have managed 14 crashes from 14 searches.
I cannot reproduce this problem. Could it be font related? What happens if you search for something else that will show results in “foreign” characters, such as “site:jp”?