Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2019 June 17

= June 17 =

Should there be other servers in other countries?
Ok so I keep being exposed to this United States copyright law thing on images that aren’t even tooken from the USA. To me, Wikipedia is still thinking that the USA is the only country in the world when it’s not the only country in the world. Even if primary servers are in the us. I think that there should be secondary servers in other English-speaking countries, particularly in Australia, Canada, India, and the UK, just in case the primary American servers are needing maintenance. Really, Should there be secondary servers in other countries?Metric Supporter 89 (talk) 00:49, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
 * You mean, like the ones in Amsterdam and Singapore? --jpgordon&#x1d122;&#x1d106; &#x1D110;&#x1d107; 01:09, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Yeah! Metric Supporter 89 (talk) 01:38, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Doesn't make any difference. The corpus of content is replicated across these servers, rather than sharded. So if it's on one server, it's on all of them. And if some content is infringing somewhere, it's infringing.  We'd need to only store subsets of content in particular jurisdictions. Now that's certainly doable (it was demonstrated in 2002, at least) but it's not how WP / WMF wishes to operate, so it's never going to happen. Andy Dingley (talk) 01:54, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Arguably, spreading Wikipedia servers over different jurisdictions makes it subject to the union of all the legal requirements, so it's a questionable idea to begin with.... --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:54, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what you are suggesting as an alternative. Do you think that images should only be allowed if they are equally subject to (or exempt from) copyright in ALL countries? Or do you envision images only showing up when they are okay under the laws of the country the viewer is located in? Either way seems hideously complex to me. It is much simpler to have copyright laws of one jurisdiction apply and simplest for that jurisdiction to be the one that the overall project is organized in. --Khajidha (talk) 18:22, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

How can I contact him?
Hello all! I am enthralled by Japan and its people and culture and deeply admire Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Is there anyway to contact him? Must it be in Japanese? --LLcentury (talk) 02:24, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
 * At that level, virtually everyone knows English. And their translators know it very well. That's the only easy part of your journey, but good luck! InedibleHulk (talk) 03:12, 17 June 2019 (UTC)


 * His official English web site is given in the article as http://japan.kantei.go.jp/index.html. There's a "Contact us" link at the bottom, which will get you to his office, at least.  Rojomoke (talk) 05:56, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
 * However, the Prime Minister's office may or may not pay much heed to inquiries from foreign nationals. A better place to contact would be the Japanese embassy in your country, if there is one (there likely is). They will be much more familiar with handling inquiries from the foreign public. If you are interested in learning about Japan, you might also try contacting Japanese language or Japanese/Asian studies departments of universities in your country. And we might be able to help as well if you can give some specific topics of interest. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 07:45, 18 June 2019 (UTC)