They may not have *intended* to ban the whole of Qatar, but that's what they did. In fact, they've been building up to this for some time. If you look through the ban logs, wikipedia has banned qatar for a day or two at a time on several occassions. The difference is, this time the wikipedia admin banned qatar for a month. Although Jimbo Wales (the wikipedia founder) says that it was a temporary block for less than 12 hours, that's solely because of the stink caused by a slashdot front page. Here's part of the discussion that ensued among wikipedia admins:
I just want to point out that at the time the address was blocked, I had no idea that I was blocking an entire country. It was not even marked as a shared IP. Although there was a comment on the discussion page, the IP was not marked as shared and I did not read that comment to mean that this was the only ISP serving Qatar. Frankly, I am stunned that an entire country can get by with only one IP address, though I understand about proxies and the like. I would like to say that I will never do this again in the future but in all honesty, it is entirely possible that I will make similar mistakes in the future. Such is not my intention and I would never have blocked this address had I known it was shared (let alone that it was an entire nation). --Yamla 20:06, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Heh. He says it's entirely possible that he'd make the same mistake again, but I don't think he'll be making it to Qatar. Lesson learnt, I believe.
-- http://all-abroad.blogspot.com/
They may not have *intended* to ban the whole of Qatar, but that's what they did. In fact, they've been building up to this for some time. If you look through the ban logs, wikipedia has banned qatar for a day or two at a time on several occassions. The difference is, this time the wikipedia admin banned qatar for a month. Although Jimbo Wales (the wikipedia founder) says that it was a temporary block for less than 12 hours, that's solely because of the stink caused by a slashdot front page. Here's part of the discussion that ensued among wikipedia admins:
I just want to point out that at the time the address was blocked, I had no idea that I was blocking an entire country. It was not even marked as a shared IP. Although there was a comment on the discussion page, the IP was not marked as shared and I did not read that comment to mean that this was the only ISP serving Qatar. Frankly, I am stunned that an entire country can get by with only one IP address, though I understand about proxies and the like. I would like to say that I will never do this again in the future but in all honesty, it is entirely possible that I will make similar mistakes in the future. Such is not my intention and I would never have blocked this address had I known it was shared (let alone that it was an entire nation). --Yamla 20:06, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Heh. He says it's entirely possible that he'd make the same mistake again, but I don't think he'll be making it to Qatar. Lesson learnt, I believe.
--
http://all-abroad.blogspot.com/