Wikipedia Bans Qatar

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1. Will
   

   January 1st, 2007 at 7:12 pm

   and I *love* Catch 22s…

2. Michael Arrington
   

   January 1st, 2007 at 7:13 pm

   It’s one of my father’s favorite books. I just re-read it over the holidays.

3. Judson
   

   January 1st, 2007 at 7:14 pm

   It would take a huge change in consensus for that to happen. There are virtually no people that want to block anon users completely, they do actually contribute a lot, somewhat counterintuitive but true

4. Jimbo Wales
   

   January 1st, 2007 at 7:26 pm

   Well, that ip number was only blocked for 8 hours, and was already unblocked 6 hours ago. This sort of thing is completely routine and not newsworthy. What’s newsworthy is that we are LESS likely to block ip numbers like this, i.e. that we TRY to keep them unblocked for the minimum possible time. (There is a similar situation in Thailand, for example.)

5. David Mackey
   

   January 1st, 2007 at 7:52 pm

   I should try Catch-22 again. I tried it in high school and hated it - didn’t even finish it. But anyways, I really do wish Wikipedia would drop anonymous editing. Why do we need anonymous editing?

6. Jimbo Wales
   

   January 1st, 2007 at 7:58 pm

   Anonymous editing rocks, that’s why.

7. Jimbo Wales
   

   January 1st, 2007 at 8:04 pm

   Er, in comment 5 I meant to say “we try to keep them BLOCKED for the minimum possible time”. Typo, sorry…

8. Peter Cooper
   

   January 1st, 2007 at 8:28 pm

   One answer to this problem is for Wikipedia to end anonymous editing and force user accounts on anyone that wants to contribute.

   This should have happened a long time ago.

   Anonymous editing was an important feature when Wikipedia was relatively unknown, but now Wikipedia is famous enough that people feel motivated enough to create accounts. On the handful of pages I have a ‘watch’ on, I’d say 90-95% of anonymous IP editors provide nothing useful.

   So.. it was a great idea to hit critical mass, but now Wikipedia’s got there, I don’t think it needs it anymore.

9. Erik Kalviainen
   

   January 1st, 2007 at 8:53 pm

   Talk about a sensational headline. More accurately “Wikipedia prohibits anonymous edits from Qatar’s only IP address”. Not quite as catchy, I guess. People in Qatar can browse Wikipedia anonymously or make edits with a simple registration.

10. Saïd Amin
    

    January 1st, 2007 at 10:11 pm

    Whoa! This is pretty extreme. Who’s next? The United Arab Emirates also has one government operated ISP (Etisalat).

    I recently wrote a short piece about the challenging scammer problem that social networking and dating sites have to deal with.

    http://saidamin.wordpress.com/.....-scammers/

    Peace.

    -S

11. geomark
    

    January 1st, 2007 at 10:16 pm

    It’s news that Wikipedia did this. But blocking vast numbers of innocent internet users is widespread. Take MessageLabs, for example, which blacklists ISPs that are reported as spam sources. Their list includes the Telephone Organization of Thailand, one of the country’s biggest ISPs, and the one I happen to use. Can you imagine a spam filtering service blocking Verizon or SBC or (insert your favorite large U.S. telecom provider) because some spammers are using it? - just plain stupid.

    I don’t know the numbers of users on TOT but Thailand has a population of 63 million and many, many internet users, probably vastly more than Qatar. MessageLabs is just one example of these stupid services; I’ve encountered numerous others.

12. Lars Plougmann
    

    January 1st, 2007 at 11:06 pm

    When I tried to log in to my digg account from United Arab Emirates, login failed with the message “Sorry - bad IP address”.
    Now that I have continued on to Oman, digg is allowing me in again.
    The logical conclusion seems to be always to have access to psiphon or similar proxy service.

13. Rajeev Vashisht
    

    January 1st, 2007 at 11:28 pm

    I hope one day there would be AI Filters to deal with spams, which could detect spam content and suspend their publishing.

    http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com

14. k
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 12:55 am

    No blog is without potential for sensationalized hyperbolic headlines! Go TechCrunch!

15. k
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 12:59 am

    “due to the technical workings of an automated censor imposed by the sole national high speed ISP, this IP represents the entirety of the country of Qatar” - a Wikipedia contributor.

    One wonders: what is the ratio of number of people blocked by this incident versus number of websites blocked by the Qatar government? Sounds like a story.

16. Vasikola
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 1:22 am

    Vandalism!!!Quite bad

17. Blaze
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 3:12 am

    Haha 1 IP for the whole country? That ISP needs to be slapped.

18. Alex
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 5:21 am

    It’s time for anonymous edits to go. If someone has something worth publishing they should register to do so.

19. David Gerard
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 6:00 am

    Anonymous editors are still a net gain to the wiki. Importantly, it makes it very easy for people to get their first hit of wikicrack without creating yet another d*mn webpage login If it’s easy for people to start, it’ll be easy for people to continue.

20. andy carvin
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 8:01 am

    This isn’t exactly a new problem. I’ve worked with a lot of school districts and some of them have found their entire district banned because of a small number of bad apples using their classroom PCs for vandalism. This has affected some very large districts in the US, as well as much of Ontario.

    http://www.andycarvin.com/arch.....s_sch.html

21. Otto
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 9:24 am

    Muslims touch spam? Isn’t that made of pork *snicker*

22. mathew
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 9:41 am

    I’m disappointed that nobody seems to have published the IP address. I have zero friends in Qatar, and could happily block the entire country from my personal web site…

23. I
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 11:30 am

    According to a study by a tech consulting firm (i think it was IBM), vandalism on wikipedia is fixed within a few minutes by the user community. Blocking users, or requiring users to register to edit wikipedia is the wrong answer.

24. Nicholas Moreau
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 12:29 pm

    “Blocking users, or requiring users to register to edit wikipedia is the wrong answer.”

    In most cases, yes. But if someone makes hobby out of vandalising our site, we block them simply so we can focus on quality and depth. Would you rather a Wikipedia that’s useful and improving, or one that only grows at a slug’s pace, due to the vandalism?

25. John Ndege
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 2:14 pm

    Well, I can understand Wikipedia’s decision, vandalism is a serious threat, but this catch 22 situation, doesnt help the average Quatari who now cannot contribute to the community unless they can travel abroad and log in remotely! If you want to take a social justice perspective then the less economically advanteaged of the Quatari’s will be unable to contribuute on issues they are best qualified to post. Its a shame, but Wikipedia has to do what it has to do.

    John

26. karl
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 2:25 pm

    this is crazy. i actually grew up in qatar and know the telecom company (qtel) well. they are a complete monopoly. hopefully, this will urge the local government to create some competition (i highly doubt it but its a good headline).
    i made a number of edits to the entry in wiki…but from the US. it seems people will now need to depend on “ex-qatar residents” to contribute.

27. Hobo
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 2:43 pm

    Ummm… wikipedia says that Qatar is blocked for only 12 hours…

28. John Ndege
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 4:13 pm

    I think the consequence of this is yet to be seen. Eventually anonymous anonymous global wide editing may be extinguished and this could be the route cause. Its a slipperly slope, either way, i feel the days of anonymity may be numbered. It is a real shame

29. John
    

    January 2nd, 2007 at 6:09 pm

    The Fundamental Problem with ‘Western’ Wikis, a blog post on the same topic . This was written in Feb 2006

30. bazbsg
    

    January 3rd, 2007 at 3:10 am

    I live in Singapore which has the same single IP address arrangement that Qatar has. Singapore was blocked for 9 fortnights which I believe is 122 days or 4 months. I wanted to make a contribution (actually, deleting a bit of nonsense that I had discovered on the Kaleidoscope article) and had to waste a lot of time looking for a way to create an account or to inform Wikipedia that they were blocking an entire country and not just a single vandal. They suggested that I try to create an account from work, but I work in Singapore too. I had to ask a friend in England to create an account for me.

31. Andrew
    

    January 8th, 2007 at 5:47 pm

    For quite a while, Westnet, one of the biggest ISPs in Western Australia with over 80,000 customers in that state alone, directed its WA customers through one IP address that was getting repeatedly blocked. Took quite some negotiation to get that fixed - some types of blocks were even affecting registered users. I for one support anonymous editing - on the articles I keep a watch on, in many cases they make spelling corrections, improve the language or revert vandalism by other (registered) users - you do get the odd vandal but not at a higher rate than with registered users. There’s a particular case of one in the 68 range who is probably Wikipedia’s most well known vandalism patroller with 15,000+ edits.