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January 02, 2007, 02:53 PM ET
Welcome Back, Qatar
If you've stopped by Slashdot, Techcrunch, or CNET in the past couple of days, you've probably read that Wikipedia briefly shut the entire nation of Qatar out of the site's article-editing process. Because the blockade seemed to fly in the face of Wikipedia's open-source principles -- and, perhaps, because Qatar is home to Al Jazeera -- the news spawned several lengthy online debates about the encyclopedia's embrace of anonymous editors and its attempts to root out spammers and vandals.
But it looks like reports of Wikipedia's embargo on Qatar were a bit overblown. The Guardian's technology blog appears to have the straight story: Qatar has only one Internet provider, and the entire nation shares a single IP address. When anonymous posters from that address started flooding the encyclopedia with what Wikipedians deemed to be spam, a Wikipedia administrator took the fairly routine step of temporarily blocking such contributors. (Qataris who had already created Wikipedia accounts were never blocked from the site.)
The administrator didn't notice, however, that Qatar's IP address was on the site's shortlist of addresses that should almost never be blocked, according to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder. When other Wikipedians noticed the error, about 12 hours later, they removed the blockade. Mr. Wales was quick to note that "a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy." --Brock Read
Categories: Research
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