Wikipedia blocked in Saudi Arabia
There are reports that Wikipedia has been sporadically inaccessible in Saudi Arabia since last week according to Arab News.
Saudi site-blocking officials can’t seem to decide what to do with Wikipedia, a popular online public-access encyclopedia that amasses information on virtually everything under the sun. In recent weeks the site has been blocked, unblocked, blocked and unblocked again. Yesterday the site was accessible, but earlier in the week it wasn’t.
This seemingly arbitrary site-blocking method has called into question the credibility of the Saudi filtering policy for Internet sites.
Wikipedia Signpost had this to say:
According to the story, Saudi Arabia effectively has only one Internet service provider, except for satellite users who are unaffected by the blocks. Its policy is to block sites that are “in violation of Islamic tradition or national regulations”. Blocking is done at the direction of the Saudi government, which sometimes directly requests the blocking of a particular site. The report did mention that the organization is going through a restructuring process, and mistakes are sometimes made in blocking.
If in fact Saudi officials are blocking Wikipedia due to religious concerns, this probably is not the first such case. Pakistan reportedly briefly blocked access to Wikipedia at the peak of the controversy over cartoon depictions of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. Wikipedia nevertheless remains popular in Pakistan, ranking #14 among websites in traffic there according to Alexa’s country breakdowns. It no longer ranks in the top 100 in Saudi Arabia after making a brief appearance on that list earlier.
Hope this can get sorted out before Wikimania 2006 next week. There may be a lightning talk about how to deal with censorship overseas.
