Stories fly around the web with such alacrity that reeling them in again is a daunting task.
That seems to be at least part of what's gone on with a tale floating around that Wikipedia had banned the entire country of Qatar from making edits to the site. It's been picked up by Techcrunch and Slashdot among others, leading to this from Mike Arrington:
Apparently Qatar has a single ISP, Qtel, with a single IP address shared by the entire country. Wikipedia has blocked that IP address for anonymous edits, but is allowing users of that IP address with actual Wikipedia accounts to continue to edit articles. There's one problem, though. You can't create an account if you enter Wikipedia from that IP address.
Jimmy Wales has already posted a comment on the wiki talk page itself saying that the story (which he has called "bullshit") wasn't correct:
"This IP number was temporarily blocked for less than 12 hours, and a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy"
So what happened? Well, the situation seems to have provoked anger among some users - particularly because the Arab media station Al-Jazeera is based in the country. Jimmy has argued that this is actually a very common procedural part of Wikipedia - and it's certainly particularly problematic because Qatar's censorious regime strangles the internet for its 165,000 users. So perhaps this is more interesting because it highlights how a net bottleneck can destroy freedom of information for people.
I think it also suggests another good reason that Wikipedia might consider the end of anonymous editing. But I'm only a very irregular Wikipedian... do any regulars have a different opinion?
Update: Jimmy Wales got in touch to tell me that it was essentially an administrative error. "The admin who did the block did not realize that the IP number was one of the special ones that we try to keep open even when there is a repeated series of vandalisms. Other admins pointed it out, and the IP was quickly unblocked."
