Now that we have taken the necessary first step to regard the English
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects as high-profile platforms for
political statements, we ought to consider what other critical humanitarian
problems we could use our considerable visibility and reputation to
address. We could draw attention to the crises in Sudan or Nigeria, drone
attacks against civilians in Afghanistan, the permanent occupation of the
Palestinian territories, the Iranian effort to develop nuclear
capabilities, police misconduct in virtually any country, the treatment of
women and women's rights in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and the list could
go on and on.
There are so many good candidates, in fact, we will need some way of
narrowing them down. A SOPA protest fits a somewhat narrow range - a United
States law that could effect a Wikimedia project. We could protest against
the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping laws, national security letters,
unpublicized cooperation between major ISPs and national intelligence
agencies, laws that allow speech online to be deemed "material support and
comfort" of a terrorist group, etc. etc.
Of course, there is no articulated reason to limit ourselves this way.
Surely a large portion of our voting community would be against pending
attempts to restrict free speech on the Internet in India (a nation with
many English speakers and many Wikimedians, and an office of the WMF). I
can't imagine we would get much opposition to a protest against censorship
and filtering in China, which has more Internet users than any other nation
and represents a vast untapped resource for the open source and open
knowledge community. Many other countries filter or block our content to
the detriment of their citizens, and we could surely add pressure and
attention to these important issues.
The possibilities are, quite unfortunately, nearly endless. Obviously we
can't keep Wikipedia offline and just rotate the protest message; perhaps
we should consider creating a Campaign of the Week (or Month?) to highlight
humanitarian problems. All we need are volunteers to set up a
Wikipedia:CotW and get it rolling, and we can start to make a real
difference.
Nathan