Wikipedia Did Not Ban Qatar (Not Exactly)

Wikipedia founder Jim Wales wants everybody to know that he or his editing team did not ban the entire country of Qatar. While he shouts that correction to the zealous blogosphere, we are suddenly chilled at David A message from Jim "Jimbo" Wales, at Wikipedia's User Talk:

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. This IP number was temporarily blocked for less than 12 hours, and a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy.

Yesterday, while the rest of us were nursing the side effects of a proper New Year's Eve party, Slashdot and TechCrunch reported that Qatar was now Wiki-persona-non-grata. And to be fair to them, that is sort of how it appeared as explained at Wikipedia. But that the whole country was blocked was the unintended consequence of trolling for vandals. And it wasn't an outright block. Wikipedia disallowed users from 82.148.97.69 from anonymously editing entries. The problem was that IP address is the only IP address for 885,000 people, through the only ISP in the country. "Talk about a sensational headline," comments Erik Kalviainen at Well, that ip number was only blocked for 8 hours, and was already unblocked 6 hours ago. This sort of thing is completely routine and not newsworthy. What's newsworthy is that we are LESS likely to block ip numbers like this, i.e. that we TRY to keep them blocked* for the minimum possible time. This small rift in the blogosphere carries with it two larger issues that should be addressed in all things Web 2.0 (or in the upgrade, Web 3.0?). The first, as alluded to earlier, is the point and click light speed nature of real time information. "Sometimes it almost seems people would be better served if the information came at a slightly slower pace," writes Mr. Utter, whom I will now refer to as Yogi. But also, as commentators address at Tech Crunch, it brings up something Wales should consider as his user-generated knowledge phenom develops. Anonymous editing, especially on sensitive topics (*Original comment said "unblocked." Wales follows up with the correction. Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Bookmark murdok: