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by diegoperini 2325 days ago
Here in Turkey, we had Wikipedia banned for 4 years. Luckily, the ban has been lifted last month.

I'm not arguing blockchain would be a good mitigation for a future incident though.
1 comments
JshWright 2325 days ago
Was that the fault of Wikipedia's database?
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samatman 2325 days ago
In a limited sense, yes, it was.

Because Wikipedia's database is centralized, and lives at a particular (range of) IP addresses, it's trivial for a state actor to censor it.

Does a sprinkling of magic blockchain solve this problem? Not really. But something more specific to the problem might; being able to torrent the full data dump is a step in the right direction.

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dharma1 2325 days ago
You can torrent a full snapshot

https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

And also download snapshots from IPFS

https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/

I guess the issue with snapshots of large datasets is that they go out of date, and downloading the whole data set regularly is a bit painful

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samatman 2325 days ago
Well, yes, that's why I indicated that being able to torrent a fully snapshot is a step in the right direction.
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JshWright 2325 days ago
Users do not connect directly to the database. Turkey definitely didn't blackhole traffic to Wikipedia's database.
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icebraining 2325 days ago
The fact that users can't connect directly to the database is, at least in part, a limitation of the database chosen.
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jonathanpierre 2325 days ago
Yes, in a strictly semantic sense, it is a limitation. However, in general such access would be not only a bad idea due to the loss of abstraction and additional work to implement (duplicate) access controls, it would also not be very useful for users over the multiple possibilities for access that already exist.

And all this is really a red herring, both in relation to the unspecified use of blockchain and in relation to resistance to state censorship.

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icebraining 2324 days ago
No, it's not a red herring. The point is that Wikipedia could use a database that didn't rely on a limited number of access endpoints, which would make it harder to censor. And you don't need duplicate access controls if the database implemented them fully.

This is not restricted to the blockchain, of course. Something like e.g. SSB fits the bill.

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