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Comment by beardyw | Hacker News Reader

I am trying to think why Wikipedia would care about this. They offer a free service - if you don't want it that's just disappointing.

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They don't care. They know people can get around the blocks.

Wikipedia is more valuable with accurate content, even if some countries make it harder to access.

May I suggest they really do care about the situation and this is why they refuse to block anything.

I don't know regarding Pakistan, but it isn't true that they generally don't care: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2022/06/13/wikimedia-fo...

Then everyone in Pakistan gets deprived of a valuable source of knowledge on virtue of their government being obscurantist.

The people who actually care are the Pakistani people. Let them fight it. Wikipedia can and should just keep doing what its doing.

An ideological commitment to free knowledge, mostly. It's upsetting to be cut off from people who could use it.

It would be nice if it would be free knowledge. But, like the rest of the internet, wikipedia became a victim of people with an agenda (to not say 3 letter agencies).

Because the law of a country (a very populated country) prohibits it.

In the same sense they supposedly would remove whatever violates hate speech laws or copyright laws in some other countries that the ones they operate in.

> Because the law of a country (a very populated country) prohibits it

s/law/rulers/g

> s/law/rulers/g

You don't need to replace them. They are equivalent.

There is a major difference between "rule of law" and "rule of rulers". Yes, rulers make laws. No, that's not the same as the rule of law.

They also offer a paid service, with Google notably a customer.

Because people who don't want to access Wikipedia already can decide to not access it, but the ones who want to can't. Pakistan is not a singular person.

They might care that Pakistani Wikipedia editors and readers alike could find themselves targeted by the Pakistani authorities.

By that argument, HN should remove any comment that mentions Tianenmen Square, so that readers in China do not find themselves targeted by the CCP.

I am certainly not arguing for censorship of Wikipedia, I’m just responding to the comment asking why Wikipedia would care about this situation.

Okay, they might care. But they won't care in a way that causes them to censor anything, so it's a moot point. Pakistan is just not going to affect the editorial policy of Wikipedia. They know this, so they made a decision to block the site. Oh well, sucks for Pakistanis, and since it's a democracy, all I can say is - elect better governments.

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