The Wikipedia ban on Qatar

January 2nd, 2007

wikipediaqatar

As some of you already heard Wikipedia banned all of Qatar for anonymous edits. It seems that the only ISP there is Qtel and more amazing they use only ONE IP address for the whole country to exit the Internet. That’s not wise even for a small country such as Qatar, I mean business users here in Romania receive up to 3 free IP addresses so it’s not that expensive.

Anyway the idea is that Wikipedia banned that single IP and all users who didn’t have a account to that date couldn’t edit content at all. The Wikipedia staff says this action was taken due to excessive spamming and vandalism from that IP, and I don’t blame them, IP banning is one of the most used means to get read of spam. Bottom line is that users from Qatar were prevented to edit anything if they didn’t have an account.

Well this isn’t such a big deal after all but many are afraid that (and I quote):” Services that we are used to and that are indispensable to us could be denied from us suddenly”. Well in my opinion that’s a little exaggerated given the fact that no one will cut your Internet access if you have done nothing wrong and furthermore there are endless possibilities to avoid restrictions such as using a proxy server or using software like Psiphon.

What can I say? Try to use your own public IP address and don’t be a spammer!