Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

(In reply to Yuri from comment #0)
> Suggestion:
> Add the template GeoLimit that would allow or disallow particular parts of
> the article based on the geographical location, or country.
> The particular use may look lime this:
> {{GeoLimit|exlcude|country="XX"|country="YY"|region="EU"|Some content deemed
> dangerous by some government for the population they preside over and fear
> the rebellion from. Materials can be as mundane as some historical
> references.}}

Unlikely to happen. Can you imagine the flame wars. If you really want to persue this, start an RFC on meta or at least a thread on wikimedia-l, and tell us if you get consensus.

> 
> Motivation:
> This particular edit to ru-wikipedia
> http://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.
> php?title=%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%8F_%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%B1%D0%B0&diff=617415
> 40&oldid=61315879 This edit removes the references to the Adolf Hitler book
> Mein Kampf. This removal is done because the court in one of the regions of
> Russia decided that the references violate Russian laws. Those laws are
> concerned with something called the "extremist materials". In this case
> court decided that this book is and "extremist material", even though it is
> a very well known and recognized book, written by a very well known person.

That's unfortunate.

[Unofficial comment (Actually all my comments are unofficial, since I'm just a random person and not someone "important"), IANAL, etc]. The web servers are physically located in the United States, the only laws that should be of concern are that of the United states, regardless of which language edition of Wikipedia we are talking about. If people are getting legal threats, they should contact legal@wikimedia.org

> 
> My suggestion, if implemented, would allow to prevent such arbitrary
> court/government decisions from influencing the content of wikipedia for the
> users not living in that country/region, and who don't have to be affected
> by such rulings. Otherwise, wikipedia will have to keep deleting random
> content based on such arbitrary determinations of random local authorities.

I don't believe [IANAL, unofficial opinion, I'm just some guy on the internet, etc] that we are bound by the laws of random countries that we don't operate in. So the answer could be to just not delete said content.


------

I'm marking this wontfix because I believe that anyone who tried to implement this would get eaten by the larger Wikimedia community. Feel free to re-open if you somehow manage to talk it over with the larger Wikimedia community and get them to agree.

Hmm, Russian wikipedia is very aggressively controlled (can't answer exactly by whom and why, but probably by their government agents posing as wikipedia admins). They will probably ban anyone who will try to revert this.

(In reply to Yuri from comment #2)
> Hmm, Russian wikipedia is very aggressively controlled (can't answer exactly
> by whom and why, but probably by their government agents posing as wikipedia
> admins). They will probably ban anyone who will try to revert this.

Bugzilla is not really a place to investigate/do anything about it, since that's not a technical issue. I suggest you bring up the issue on either https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l or at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum

Ok, I started the discussion thread on wikimedia-l.

From a technical standpoint, by the way, this strikes me as intractably complex.

Not only would you need to censor the page *as viewed*, you would need to censor the page *as editable*, which means tearing out parts of the page in the edit box. The user would be unable to edit those parts, and the parser would have to stick them back in on the other end. Which, as the Parsoid project proves, is very hard, if not impossible, in Wikitext.

On top of that, it may cause things to be impossible to style - if a censorship block goes around an opening tag for one style thing or another, the parser may still be able to display that style (again, it would be HARD), but the editor wouldn't be able to change it without massively nasty hacks.