I can understand shutting it down to Indian IP ranges, but the whole world? I think they should have stood up to the Indian court and took wikipedia offline for India, otherwise soon there will be avalanche of demands to take down anything negative about modi, trump, xi, and putin.
A comment from Jimbo Wales on WMF Legal's reasoning for the temporary takedown can be found on the on-wiki discussion on the topic, the reason given is to preserve the Foundations ability to appeal:
> Hi everyone, I spoke to the team at the WMF yesterday afternoon in a quick meeting of the board. [...] note that I am not a lawyer and that I am not here speaking for the WMF nor the board as a whole. I'm speaking personally as a Wikipedian. [...] I can tell you that I went into the call initially very skeptical of the idea of even temporarily taking down this page and I was persuaded very quickly by a single fact that changed my mind: if we did not comply with this order, we would lose the possibility to appeal and the consequences would be dire in terms of achieving our ultimate goals here. For those who are concerned that this is somehow the WMF giving in on the principles that we all hold so dear, don't worry. I heard from the WMF quite strong moral and legal support for doing the right thing here - and that includes going through the process in the right way. Prior to the call, I thought that the consequence would just be a block of Wikipedia by the Indian government. While that's never a good thing, it's always been something we're prepared to accept in order to stand for freedom of expression. We were blocked in Turkey for 3 years or so, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
Actual change is not required, symbolic change is enough.
India, much like Nazi Germany, is a culture that views position over all else; simply being in power is enough to make your word greater than anyone else's truth.
I don't assume leadership, even in Wikipedia, is particularly concerned with freedom of knowledge. The foundation is flush with cash, constantly begs for more and still can't manage to stand up to this challenge?
Wait and watch. Wikipedia will do anything but never leave India. It’s a funny world we live in where foreign NGOs and “organisations with good intentions” operate to control opinions of the biggest set of people in a shady neo-colonialistic manner. BBC’s antics in India should be studied in detail. NGOs and portals like caravan that sprang up out of nowhere and “stay relevant with little public support” (key phrase), serve one-sided narratives which people are now seeing through hence they elected the same leadership a third time (almost unprecedented). These narratives from BBC, Caravan are what Wikipedia uses to back their claims. They are upset that their multiple attempts at painting a leader as a perpetrator of mass genocide don’t stick in the minds of people.
You know, given this is the third time I have read this exact text block I have:
a) increased my credence that this is a bot
b) increased my credence that you're spreading ideological bs claims not worth investigating further, despite being initially curious to learn more the first time I read this
Copy pasting a comment everywhere not a good look IMO. It shows a general lack of engaging with fellow humans in dialogue and makes you look like you might just be spreading something trying to reach as many eyes as possible because you're being paid to do so.
You want engagement from a bot 1 on 1? Let me do it for you. I know politically incorrect opinions are tough to digest in the West. If someone doesn't comply with your echo chamber, you find it hard to wrap your head around it. That's how the lands of the free work nowadays sadly. I got one reply after posting it thrice. Says enough about why I did it, seemingly I'm the one who doesn't "want engaging dialogue" lol. Some people love to remain in delusion and take tags like "BBC", "citations" at face value. You are welcome to continue doing it. Isn't it funny how BBC is a govt funded agency but they are obviously unbiased coz they are white. That's why I said earlier it's a funny world we live in.
I checked to see how large the Indic Wikipedias are, and the Tamil project is the largest at #60, while Hindi is #62, Bangla #63. (Urdu is #54, if you count it among them.)
Now, those are further down in the list than I would've expected, but I suppose that the answer is that many Indians are contributing to English Wikipedia in the first place, due to greater exposure and fluency in that country.
There is certainly extensive coverage of Bollywood, cricket, and other topics of great appeal to Indians at home and abroad.
