p2pnet.net News:- According to the BBC, everyone in Qatar has been barred from accessing the Wikipedia.

The ban was imposed after pages about the US, sex and the birthday of the prophet Muhammad were vandalised, states the story. It hits everyone in the country because all web traffic in Qatar is routed through a single net address, it says.

But, “If you came here from a news headline saying that Wikipedia has banned all of Qatar, please pop right back over there and post in the comments that the story is not true,” declares Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales on User Talk.

He goes on:

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.

To any and all reporters, from Slashdot, TechCrunch, mainstream media, etc.: You may email me and ask me for my personal cellphone number, which I will answer 24 hours a day to confirm or disconfirm any such story of this type. –Jimbo Wales 03:32, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

“As one who was affected by the block, I’d like to clarify. On 30 December 2006, a Wikipedia admin placed a one-month block on the IP address 82.148.97.69 for reasons of chronic vandalism and spam,” says User Talk.

“The IP address turned out to belong to a QTel proxy server, and thus anonymous posting from the whole of Qatar was blocked. Account creation was also blocked, but this condition was later relaxed after the ban was widely reported across technology sites. Ngourlay 11:21, 2 January 2007 (UTC)”

Stay tuned.

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If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

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Also See:
BBC - Wikipedia ‘bans Qatar net users’, January 2, 2007

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