Talk:Internet censorship and surveillance by country/Archive 2

Map is Completely Misleading
The map's title is updated but the data does not match what it supposedly portrays. Coloring countries such as the United States which practice no active censorship as "pervasive" when you indicate the definition centimeters away as "Pervasive: A large portion of content in several categories is blocked." The picture either needs to be altered to show accurate data, or removed from the article because it's actively deceiving users who are coming to this page. 72.240.237.85 (talk) 18:56, 28 December 2015 (UTC)


 * The definition that you cite is the definition for the pervasive category used by the Open Net Initiative (ONI). ONI is just one of several sources that are summarized in this article. Another is Reporters Without Borders (RWB). RWB listed the U.S. as an Internet Enemy in 2014 mostly because of its surveillance practices. And that puts the U.S. into the article's pervasive classification according to the criteria in use and explained in the article. The map simply summarizes the article. So, if you think the map needs to be changed, then the criteria used in the article need to change.


 * The criteria used in the article do need to change, because both the RWB and ONI ratings are no longer being updated. There is an item earlier on this talk page about this, but that item has gotten little discussion from other editors. Nevertheless, I've been slowly working to include more of the ratings from Freedom House's Freedom on the Net (FOTN) report into the article. When that is finished, my plan is to rework the article's criteria to deemphasize RWB and ONI and to give more weight to FOTN, to move countries to new categories according to the updated criteria, and to rework the map based on the revised classifications in the updated article.


 * Of course, I'm not the only person who can do this work. If others are willing to help, it will get done sooner. Or others can suggest other approaches that they think would work better. It might be possible to create three maps, one that summarizes this article, one that deals with censorship, and one that deals with surveillance. Or this article could be split into two, with one about censorship and one about surveillance, and separate new maps to summarize each article. One difficulty is that there are not many reliable sources that rate countries' surveillance practices. FOTN is one. If people know of others, please suggest them. Another difficulty is that any of the changes will take a fair bit of work.


 * What I don't think is appropriate, is to treat the U.S. as a special case and deal with it by itself without applying the same criteria to all of the countries summarized in the article and displayed on the map.


 * --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 07:28, 29 December 2015 (UTC)


 * ✅. The map has been updated to agree with the classifications in the article. The article now uses 2016 and 2017 data from the FOTN report. The article also uses updated criteria for its classifications (Persuasive, Substantial, Selective, and Little or none) with a increased emphasis on the FOTN country scores and less of an emphasis on the RWB lists and the ONI classifications which are no longer being updated. --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 19:50, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

A new name for this article?
I'm starting to think that this article should be renamed from "Internet censorship by country" to "Internet censorship and surveillance by country". In the last two years or so more and more emphasis is being placed on issues related to surveillance in addition to more purely censorship issues. Of course it is hard to do censorship without some form of surveillance. And while it is possible to practice surveillance without engaging in censorship, surveillance on its own can lead to intimidation and self-censorship. A few of the countries on the RWB "Internet Enemies" list are there because they engage in surveillance even though they practice little or no direct censorship.

What do others think about a new name? -Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 00:50, 26 June 2014 (UTC)


 * ✅. I went ahead and did the move / rename. -Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 14:48, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Well done :-) --Atlasowa (talk) 14:51, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

I have to disagree on this point because, though censorship does require surveillance, I have looked for information relating to non-Internet surveillance here and found nothing. The current title is misleading and should be adjusted. MaddieKM (talk) 21:16, 22 February 2018 (UTC)


 * What would you suggest? --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 21:38, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Article too long?
A 2L template was added to the article by Bill Hicks on 4 February 2019. I'd like to start a discussion here to see if others agree that the "article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably" and that we should "consider splitting content into sub-articles, condensing it, or adding subheadings." And if there is agreement, how do we address it?

The article is long. But you would expect it to be since it includes or should include information about Internet censorship and surveillance for every country in the world. I don't think most people read the article from beginning to end. Instead I think they probably use it as a reference to find out information about a few specific countries or to compare Internet censorship in a few countries. The article already has sub-headings and indexes to help people find the information they want. Some of the entries for individual countries could probably be condensed, but the article as a whole would still be fairly long. I don't think splitting the article into sub-articles by region or by level of censorship would really help and would make it harder to find specific information.


 * -Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 22:23, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Absolutely too long, the solution is probably to split by continent, pending any other suggestions. Onetwothreeip (talk) 22:54, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Far too long. Splittng by continent would be a sensible start. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 00:35, 29 March 2019 (UTC)