SEO News Blog

I woke up this afternoon, one of the best nights ever!, to find some disturbing news apparently Wikipedia is done with the people of Qatar spamming it’s index. This is massive as Wikipedia has never blocked an entire country from editing it’s content before.

Any Qatar user that tries to edit a page on Wikipedia will be met with this error page explaining that even if you register you may still not be able to edit Wikipedia:

…due to the technical workings of an automated censor imposed by the sole national high speed ISP, this IP represents the entirety of the country of Qatar, which means effectively that the entire country has been blocked from editing anything…

I can’t believe Wikipedia would do something like this. This is destroying the whole point of Wikipedia being user run. If this trend continues we may even see more countries banned from Wikipedia. This will outrage some of the members that actually helped build Wikipedia, only to wake up one day on New Year’s Day and find out you can’t edit anything anymore.

Though it comes at a time where spammers had taken advantage of the single ISP in Qatar by using it’s proxies to spam, it’s still isn’t justifiable in any way.

Thank you

UPDATE: Apparently you can create an account and still edit content BUT you can’t create an account if you enter Wikipedia from that IP address. Which defeats the purpose still.