InformationWeek has a story from last week about a wiki - Anoniblog - with blogging tips for those who want to blog but are subject to non-democratic governments and restrictions on Freedom of Speech (to put it politely). From the article...
There are Arabic, Persian, Chinese and English versions of the guides, targeted specifically for people in Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Malaysia and Zimbabwe.
Those who work on free speech issues surrounding the popular Internet phenomenon, including Curt Hopkins of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, created the site. With the help of technical consultants and translators, they culled compiled information from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Global Voices Online and the OpenNet Initiative to create the site.
Kudos to PBwiki and David Weekly (CEO) for providing the site who are oddly not mentioned in the article (but 'Wikipedia' gets a mention). A couple observations about the site:
- If you click on the 'Changes' link, you'll see updates for the last few days. In particular, Jan 19 is several 'Reverts' back to page versions that preceded a number of hacks that occurred on Jan 16.
- More than mere mischief, the hacker ('gandhi'') appears to have some real issues with freedom of speech.
- You can see how easily David Weekly simply reverted back to the intended content.
I won't turn this into a dispassionate case study analysis This is serious stuff and I just wanted to give some recognition to the people who put the site up and the intended audience. The people who will be getting the knowledge they need to publish their works under such repressive conditions take huge risks in what they do.
I have the utmost respect for what the wiki site builders are trying to do and for those people who live under such conditions of tyranny that they can not express their opinion for fear of such retribution.
You have my prayers. I know it makes me realize how lucky I am to live in a country that guarantees such freedoms and has people willing to make the effort for others to have those freedoms.
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