Wikipedia Blocks Qatar [Updated]

GrumpySimon writes "Wikipedia has blocked the entire country of Qatar from editing pages. Whilst the ban is due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, the fact that this belongs to the country's sole high-speed internet provider has the unintended consequence of stopping Qataris from editing the wiki. The ban has raised concerns about impartiality — the majority of Al Jazeera journalists operate out of Qatar, for example. This raises a number of issues about internet connectivity in small countries — what other internet bottlenecks like this exist?" Update: 01/02 13:32 GMT by Z : Jim Wales wrote in the comments that the story is 'completely false'. Either way, the ban has been lifted and anonymous editing is once again possible from Qatar.

IPv6

[Watson Ladd (955755)]

It's situations like this that should make small countries upgrade to IPv6. What surprises me is that they haven't already.

Re:

[davef139 (790691)]

If a country has a sole isp what makes you think they can afford to upgrade to IPv6, their customers are probably using win95 still.

OT: Qatar is not in the UAE

[by Anonymous Coward]

Lots of people have tagged this story with 'uae'. Well contrary to what you might think Qatar is not part of the United Arab Emirates. It is an emirate and an independent state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar [wikipedia.org]

If you agree that Qatar is not part of the UAE, please tag this story 'notuae' and mod this comment 'Informative' so everyone will see it.

Let's show Qatar that unlike Wikipedia, Slashdot is not a haven of ignorance.

Re:OT: Qatar is not in the UAE

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

Let's show Qatar that unlike Wikipedia, Slashdot is not a haven of ignorance.

Says the guy who uses a Wikipedia link to back up his assertions... : p

Re:

[Das Modell (969371)]

Just because Wikipedia isn't 100% accurate at all times doesn't mean that it's useless as a source of information, especially very basic information.

Re:

[cprael (215426)]

Wikipedias do not have "accuracy" as a misssion. They do have "unbiased". You might note that there is a conflict there.

Personally, I'd rather have accuracy.

Re:OT: Qatar is not in the UAE

[Macthorpe (960048)]

Really? Then you might have to edit the Five Pillars of Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] page to remove this sentence:

"All articles must follow our no original research policy and strive for accuracy"

I mean, if accuracy isn't part of their mission then there's no reason that all their articles must strive to be accurate, right?

Re:

[jc42 (318812)]

Just because Wikipedia isn't 100% accurate at all times doesn't mean that it's useless as a source of information, especially very basic information.

Yup; wikipedia is very much like a traditional dead-tree encyclopedia. Not surprising, since that was the basic model from the start. And the acknowledged limitation to "basic" information is why so many wikipedia pages have that list of references and links at the bottom.

Re:

[KutuluWare (791333)]

Let's show Qatar that unlike Wikipedia, Slashdot is not a haven of ignorance.

What the hell Slashdot have you been reading?

Re:OT: Qatar is not in the UAE

[Mr2001 (90979)]

If you agree that Qatar is not part of the UAE, please tag this story 'notuae'

NO! To cancel out the "uae" tag, you should tag it !uae. Please stop adding extra useless tags.

Re:OT: Qatar is not in the UAE

[BlueYoshi (670106)]

I cant resist to suggest the use of the following tags:

• !funny
• !YourBusiness
• !vatican
• !mattingHabitOfPurpleTurtles
• ...

So we can be sure what the story is not talking about. So the article "U.S. Mass Declassified Documents At Midnight" could use the tags !mattingHabitOfPurpleTurtles, !DanceLesson, !FreedomFriesRecipe, !WOWGoldFarming, !KillingOfKittens, !Cthulluh^wd, !takeOverTheWorld^wd, !LOL, ...

What is your favorite nontag?

Re:

[psykocrime (61037)]

What is your favorite nontag?

!nontag

Re:OT: Qatar is not in the UAE

[Pedrito (94783)]

Fortunately, I'm not from Qatar, so I CAN edit wikipedia. Give me a few minutes and Qatar WILL be part of the UAE.

Re:

[nomadic (141991)]

If a country has a sole isp what makes you think they can afford to upgrade to IPv6

Ummm, it's a very wealthy country. They have less than a million people, which is why a sole ISP might make sense, but they're not exactly suffering from poverty.

Re:

[Holmwood (899130)]

First, being geographically small and having a sole ISP has nothing to do with wealth. Second.

Qatar not able to afford to upgrade to IPv6? And stuck using Win95?

Uh... respectfully, how did the parent get marked "interesting"? Anyone who's thought about the middle east is well aware that, while it's a small country, "Oil and natural gas revenues enable Qatar to have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world." (CIA World Factbook, 2007).

We seem good at marking Qatar as UAE, and characterizing it as a

I doubt it's a lack of external IPs

[Rix (54095)]

Rather, I imagine the proxies are used for censorship.

Re:IPv6

[rs232 (849320)]

It's situations like this that should make small countries upgrade to IPv6. What surprises me is that they haven't already.

It's a matter of more cables. The recent outages in Asia were exasperated by the lack of redundant routes. You see to save money they only installed the minimum necessary cables as they 'weren't in an earthquake zone'.

--
God is dead - Nietzsche

Nietzsche is dead - God

Nietzsche thinks he's a tulip .. :)

well..

[macadamia_harold (947445)]

Whilst the ban is due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, the fact that this belongs to the country's sole high-speed internet provider has the unintended consequence of stopping Qatarese from editing the wiki.

Actually, according to wikipedia, the correct word is Qatarded, not Qatarese.

Re:

[DanielMarkham (765899)]

I think the proper name for people who live in Qatar is quaternions.

Oddly enough, most are really good at math.

Impressive...

[chazzf (188092)]

That an entry from a block log is all it takes to make Slashdot these days. This also means that any concerns have, so far, been raised only in the head of the submitter. Note also that the block was re-tooled to allow account creation, so that only anonymous editing is prevented. Finally, the block is in place for one month, not indefinitely. Nothing to see here, move along.

It's actually a blow AGAINST censorship

[goombah99 (560566)]

A state that has but a single ISP has the power of censorship readily available. By blocking this address, even as a side effect it is alerting the Quatarese to their peril. Conversely spam blocking is not censorship but rather the reverse, making public forums protected for the use of real speech. It also forces the the ISP to try to police it's own spam generators to our general benefit. Blocking it at the source is the desired solution. Hopefully people will vote with their feet and a new ISP in quatar will arise and give those folks some choice and protection from censorship.

This is not a bad thing. While the side effect is temporarily drastic, if quatar had multiple ISPS we would not be discussing this at all.

Re:

[Otter (3800)]

A state that has but a single ISP has the power of censorship readily available.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, that's exactly what happens. The whole country is behind a proxy server (or was, last I heard) and it's difficult to block a single abusive user without locking out everyone. That was my first thought reading this story, but Qatar has a vastly different government than Saudi Arabia does and there seem to be the usual accuracy problems with the summary here so I'll decline to speculate.

Re:

[nwetters (93281)]

... Qatar has a vastly different government than Saudi Arabia

You are correct in that there is more freedom of expression in Qatar than in Saudi, and the Ministry of Information was abolished in 1996. Unfortunately, QTel has not yet realised [qatar.net.qa] that there is no censorship in Qatar [bbc.co.uk].

Hard to block countries

[canuck57 (662392)]

It is hard to block a country, they can just use a web proxy to bypass IP blocking and change the PC browser country code to something friendly. Cat and mouse at best.

They who make the bed ...

[l2718 (514756)]

This seems to be a technical weakness of Qatar's method of filtering the web access of its citizens. For a website which is accessible to everyone can, the IP address is the only way to distinguish visitors from each other. Now if the government of Qatar decided to hide all its citizen's IP addreses behind that of a proxy, then the citizens of Qatar should not be surprised when they cannot be distinguished from each other by web sites. Persumably Qataris who have Wikipedia user accounts (logons) would be

Correction

[l2718 (514756)]

A "Technical Note [wikipedia.org]" on the talk page clarifies that the blocking of an IP address includes a ban on creating new user accounts. There's no discussion of what happens with existing accounts though.

Proxy servers to blame

[MoHaG (1002926)]

If Wikipedia's information on the linked page is correct, the reason that the entire Qatar is blocked, is that it is the ip of a proxy server...

It is common practice for ISP's in countries with limited bandwidth to transparently proxy all HTTP traffic in order to save bandwidth

South Africa's SAIX [wikipedia.org] does the same. However they have several proxy servers doing load sharing, which cause even more problems with sites that associate session information with one's IP. Online games preventing the trading of items by users on the same IP is also problematic.

Sites offering access on an alternative port in addition to 80 would offer a solution.

Only anon users

[StrawberryFrog (67065)]

Having read the page, it looks as if the Slashdot article may be incorrect. Users operating from that IP address and who are not logged in have been denied editing privileges due to abuse.

This is a far lesser issue, it's more accountability than censorship.

Re:

[nwetters (93281)]

Before this story appeared on the front page of slashdot, Qataris were also prevented from creating new user accounts - thus preventing anyone from posting.

Wikipedia also blocks a Canadian School District

[by Anonymous Coward]

The entire Calgary School District 192.139.27.18 is blocked and they are the biggest School District in Canada
yes it is because of vandals (at other schools) but still I cannot do anything and Im not trying to vandalize but only add good content

Re:Wikipedia also blocks a Canadian School Distric

[sinclair44 (728189)]

Exactly. The same happened for my school district; I wrote a note that it was a school proxy server on the IP's talk page, and they modified the block to only apply to unregistered users. Make a note and I'm sure they'll do the same for you.

summary wrong

[Fëanáro (130986)]

Wikipedia has blocked anonymous contributions from one IP, which happens to be a proxy from that country.
Users can still edit wikipedia throught this proxy by creating an account and logging in.

Creating a wikipedia account only requires a (throw-away) email, and is actually more anonymous, since your IP will not show up in the public logs if you are logged in.

Re:

[thue (121682)]

I also checked the fact, and came to the same conclusion. Mod parent up.

I am a Wikipedia administrator, and I think this block on IP edits is completely correct. IP edits (edits from users without accounts without accounts) from proxy servers with many misbehaved users should always be blocked.

Re:

[GC (19160)]

Actually, Gibraltar was recently blocked by Wikipedia in the same way and this has nothing to do with transparent proxies (GibTelecom do not use Transparent Proxies for their corporate flexiband links on which I came across this same problem recently). Trust me - I know a fair bit about transparent proxies.

While possibly being logged in will allow editing of pages - that may be so for Qatars.

Re:

[davidmcg (796487)]

But as it says in the linked to post it's impossible to create a new account when logged in through the proxy, however, existing account holders should be fine.

Some additional info...

[de la mettrie (27199)]

...on this block:

• Affected Qataris can still edit Wikipedia if they open a Wikipedia user account, which is a no-confirmation-required one-click action. Only anonymous editing is being blocked.
  
• The duration of this "soft" block is currently one month, and will probably be prolonged if there is more repeated vandalism and spam coming from this address once the block expires.
  
• Anonymous reading of Wikipedia is of course not blocked at all.

Regarding others blocked, there's Slashdot/Bahrain

[Shipwack (684009)]

I was stationed in the Kingdom of Bahrain for a few months, and apparently most of the country's internet goes through its University, which is (or was) blocked by Slashdot for some reason. I could access the site, but not login, even after I sent email to the Slashdot admins as instructed. Not very important in the grand scheme of things, just annoying at the time.

IT in Qatar

[nwetters (93281)]

So, the problem appears to be fixed. Users can now register for accounts. Thank you slashdot front page (Kjkolb [wikipedia.org]) ;)

The problem came from QTel censorship [qatar.net.qa]. Every connection passes through a QTel proxy server, which uses some simplistic rules to determine whether you should be protected from your own surfing habits. If you hit blocked pages too often, your phone rings and when you answer in English you get "I'm sorry, I must have a wrong number. CLUNK." Thus your voice has been recorded for posterity.

The shambles of Qatar's connection might be fixed soon. Q-CERT [qcert.org] has just been set up and (hopefully), someone with a bit of influence will be in charge. It is obvious that a single point of failure for an entire population's internet connection is not sensible, but whether this means a better censorship system or the scrapping of censorship remains to be seen.

So why doesn't Qarta just the stop the spammers?

[walterbyrd (182728)]

I work for a company that filters spam. We have to block big blocks of spammers now and again. To get off our blocked list, companies just have to stop the spammers. It usually just take a few days.

Please loose the excuses

[portwojc (201398)]

"The ban has raised concerns about impartiality"

Don't mask it with that or any other excuse. It's not Wikipedia's fault that they have only high speed provider who can't fix a simple problem.

ISP:
Problem: User X is abusing other networks.
Solution: Account is turned off.

Yes it's that easy if laziness weren't involved. This is exactly like those who whine when their network gets listed on an RBL. Where do those who are blocked go? They whine to the RBL or since they, the RBLs, aren't going to listen the world. They should complain to their network provider - it's where the problem is.

/. does the same thing

[yahyamf (751776)]

Slashdot blocks logins from the UAE as well most of the time. I have to use an http proxy to post comments. Several other sites do the same thing. The whole country's traffic goes through a handful of proxy servers, which are used by UAE's infamous monopoly ISP [etisalat.ae] to censor content and block VoIP calls.

Some Context: Blocking Wikispam

[dfoulger (1044592)]

I can't speak for Wikipedia's spam blocking process, but I operate a Wiki that is well known enough to get a lot of spam. I block that fairly effectively. Seven pieces of true spam have gotten through over the two and a half years since I implemented the first version of my spam blocking, but I had almost half my site overwritten at one point before that, so I take it pretty seriously. I fully understand why many Wiki owners have decided to make their Wikis read only rather than deal with it and why others have resorted to required logons, confirmations of the existence of a human, and other measures. Some useful factoids:

1. The volume of Wikispam attacks on my site more than doubled last month. I'm sure that Wikipedia gets a great deal more volume than I do and that they probably saw a similar percentage rise.
2. Most Wikispam is focused on raising the Google ranking of one or more web sites. In the past a huge portion of the volume has been focused around pornography sites. This months most commonly advertised site is a search engine called Rollyo. Minor editorial: please boycott that search engine and its associated blog.
3. Wikispam has a fairly predictable content and submission profile. While many Wikis have resorted to logins and address blocking, I've found the content so predictable that I actually removed my IP-based address blocking last month.
4. One of the more predictable aspects of Wikispam is that it is often generated from many machines via robot attacks. One presumes that the attacker is not paying to use all of these different machines (e.g. that the machines have been hijacked).
5. The middle east (and more specifically, Quatar, Kuwait, and the UAE in general) has proven to be a major source of robot attacks. I don't know if this means anything, but it suggests that machines in that part of the world are either poorly secured or have been effectively targeted by robot builders. I also get a lot of robot attacks through (presumably South) Korea.

I don't want to make any great claims, at least in part because I don't want to increase the attack frequency on my site or get slashdotted, but my software has been very effective in blocking almost everything that the spammers throw at me. I don't currently block any countries and am reluctant to publicly reveal the rules I use for the blocking, but do block about a dozen IP addresses that have been used enough to suggest that they are directly associated with individual spammers.

This story is completely false.

[jwales (97533)]

I don't know what else to say about it. Wikipedia is not blocking Qatar. An IP number was blocked for about 12 hours. There was an admin discussion about the issue. The IP number was unblocked.

Move along, nothing to see.

--Jimbo Wales

Re:

[jamie (78724)]

You wrote on the linked Wikipedia page:

This IP number was temporarily blocked for less than 12 hours, and a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy. In the English Wikipedia, such an action would require approval of at a minimum the English Arbitration Committee and/or me personally, and would never ever be undertaken lightly, nor without extensive attempts at direct negotiation with the ISP and/or nation in question.

A user who claims to be from Qatar has added, below you

Re:

[ral315 (741081)]

As the administrator who unblocked the IP, I can clarify. The account was originally blocked with account creation disabled. Upon recognition that this was Qatar's IP, another administrator allowed account creation, and I removed the block altogether shortly thereafter.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

now censored [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what else to say about it. Wikipedia is not blocking Qatar. An IP number was blocked for about 12 hours. There was an admin discussion about the issue. The IP number was unblocked.

According to Wikipedia's own logs [wikipedia.org], "under 12 hours" is totally inaccurate. A block was put in place on 30 December; then 44+ hours later it was lifted and immediately re-established (the comments suggest that this was removal of the account creation ban); then 8 hours later the block was removed. Anonymous editing

Re:

[jwales (97533)]

You're right, I had not noticed that.

"it's true"

[weierstrass (669421)]

Please cite your sources.

Re:Don't write if you don't read

[fuzz6y (240555)]

Those from Qatar are Qatari. Plural is Qataris. "Qatarese", while sounding the same, would actually be the language of Qatar, if they did not speak Arabic and such a thing actually existed. This is a classic error made by someone who doesn't read much, or doesn't understand what he reads.

You're right, of course. This isn't a case of someone just not knowing a single obscure English word, it's a failure to intuit and apply a universal rule of the language. I mean, if there's one thing English has, it's simple, consistent rules. It clearly follows that they'd be called Qataris from the names of other peoples that everyone has heard of, like the Chinis, Japanis, Sudanis, Portugis, and Burmis.