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Comment by fredguth | Hacker News Reader

Maybe colonialism, like racism, is something much more easy to spot when you are the side suffering from it.

They are not forced to use Wikipedia. They just happen to live in Africa, where most people live in 19th century by Western/Northern standards and they are hacking their way to 21st century. What would you do if you had to pay 80% of your salary for 1Gb of internet?

The hacker culture is about "creatively circumventing limitations of systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes". I can't find a better example of it.

Let the others call them pirates, but here I think we should celebrate what they did and call them by what they really are, true hackers.

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I was never arguing the creativity part of the wikipedia hack, I adore that and welcome it. I can absolutely understand why they do it and how they do it.

I was just questioning the sense of entitlement that is apparently hidden in the "colonialism" criticism, but this seems to be so ideological that it's hard to get to a basic agreement. Different views on the world, I guess.

I can understand the sentiment of feeling offended by the term "colonialism" when giving away something for free. It implies a negative intent when really people/organizations intended to do something charitable.

That said, I can also understand the sentiment of feeling "colonialized" when people are only allowed to use something under conditions/mores imposed by a "foreign party".

Different world views then? I think it's more like two sides of the same coin...

It might be more comparable to missionary work. Wikipedia is providing valuable resources, but that charitable work can be interwoven with foreign ideals.

But it seems like Wikipedia are conscious of that, so they've taken a hands-off approach to this.

Hacking doesn't always cost the system operator anything, in fact I think the confusion between hacking as the activity of creating creative improvised solutions and the circumvention of security comes from settings like the hacking of the phone system where the cost to the phone network of phreakers making calls was negligible.

File sharing is a big resource hog. It's a totally different story.

well said, thanks!

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