Web encyclopaedia Wikipedia has banned anonymous posts to its site from people in Qatar after repeated net vandalism. The ban hits everyone in the country because all web traffic in Qatar is routed through a single net address.
Wikipedia says pages about the US, sex and the birthday of the prophet Muhammad were vandalised by anonymous people in the country.
In a post on the Wikipedia site, it says: “Anonymous editing from this internet address is currently disabled due to a large volume of spam and vandalism that we have received from this address.”
Overreaction?
Well, you could say that it isn’t Wikipedia’s fault that Qatar isn’t sufficiently developed internet-wise to have multiple IP addresses (or is purposefully underdeveloped in order to implement a great-firewall strategy). Wikipedia must guard itself against wanton acts of vandalism, and its usual tool, indeed perhaps its ONLY tool, is IP bans.
It is not a purposive overreaction, but an effective one. The purpose was to block the source of the vandalism. The effect was to block out the entirety of Qatar.
It remains to be seen what the Wikipedian response is to these new facts. Note that it’s only “Anonymous editing” that is blocked from the Qatar IP, not access. If the lovely people of Qatar wish to sign up for accounts, they can still edit posts to their hearts content (unless they vandalise).
The old adage … Don’t pee in the pool.
/Haha, one IP address. I bet the whole country of Qatar is banned from a lot of websites then. This has to be a joke, right?
Exactly – anyone can get a wikipedia account and edit it all they want – even if they are from Qatar – no issue – besides, its so nice for your ego to be able to sign changes to articles that other people will see 🙂
I can hear Ray Stevens now:
Qatarzan!
And its Wiki Ban!
Vandals and Spam,
Block them we can,
Qatarzan!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar
The wiki entry seems reasonable… What is their problem?
Isn’t just having a URL against their law? I would think so.
#2 – dunno about slow, i found it, thought it was funny and posted in a diff thread – looks like Eideard thought it was funny as well.
We have the same problem here in the UAE. The fascis… I mean “caring” government runs everything we do on the ‘net through a proxy.
This can set off anti-worm or anti-spam alarms and has given me problems on Wiki.
Worst was when it disabled Google. Yikes! Google!
It took them a couple of weeks to fix it. In the meantime, the ISP answered no emails on the subject making us think we were all banned from Google.
The person on the tech support line hadn’t even noticed Google was down, making me think that that the ISP workers either don’t use Google (not likely) or they all know how to avoid the proxy. (likely).
That’s a pretty small tube.
Wow… a single IP address for an entire country… totalitarism can be the only single explanation for such a thing.