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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

About 6 months ago, Codeberg removed the repository for the Wikiless project, and IIRC did not offer any explanation to the developer for about 2 weeks.

The reason was a Wikimedia Foundation request.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33101301

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There's more to this - Wikiless was an unmodified passthrough proxy that iirc just unloaded a bunch of regular mediawiki JS because the author thought it constituted a privacy violation/they were afraid that for some reason the WMF was tracking them for malicious purposes[0].

On its own, not harmful. That being said, it ran afoul of the WMFs trademarks and was actively confusing people with regular Mediawiki, which is likely what prompted the takedown. You can read the ins and outs on Wikipedias own page about mirrors and forks, there's an explanation listed there[1].

Codeberg likely complied because if you're weighting a vaguely conspiratorial-minded (the developer of Wikiless is a "feds in the walls" type if it wasn't obvious from the previous paragraph) proxy tool against possibly being shut down since you decided to stand up for an easy trademark violation, the choice is easy.

[0]: I'd like to note that as far as I can tell, no such tooling exists on Wikipedia, nor does the WMF employ the usual culprit (ad networks) of that kind of nonsense.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/VW...

That doesn't really change anything? Taking down a repository with no explanation is unacceptable regardless of context.

It does change things. Codeberg responded to orenom's request for explanation on the same day (see the archive link in the first source about people mentioning it was taken down) and further detailed it in the subsequent days. That's decent time to respond with an explanation if you don't have a formalized process to deal with this stuff (which given Codeberg is pretty small, seems likely).

Very few providers will shoulder the risk of being dragged to court to stand in front of you when legal is involved. Most don't have the funding to go the legal route to begin with, so they just comply. "We'll go to court for you" isn't a selling point of Codeberg, which makes it silly to expect it.

"Wikiless was an unmodified passthrough proxy, it ran afoul of trademarks and it was confusing people" doesn't change anything.

"Codeberg responded to orenom's request for explanation on the same day" does change things. You didn't include this in your previous comment from what I can see. Thanks for pointing it out.

It sounds like there was an explanation?

I rely on Wikiless for making wikipedia accessible to me. It is not even about privacy, just being able to use the site without obstructions.

The whole project has been broken ever since.

Is this about the skin? If so can use the old skin (Vector 2010) if you create an account/append ?useskin=vector to the end of your URL; if not, I'm curious to hear more.

I would be very surprised if this was the case - the WMF doesn't prohibit alternative front ends in any way, and it doesn't seem to do anything they'd be upset about (unless it allowed people to evade edit blocks, but that seems incredibly doubtful); if anything, surely they'd welcome a project focused on protecting the privacy of its users?

Here's a bit more as to why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35480811

The project also doesn't actually make clear if it's actually private and not just MITMing it's own users to track them - as has been pointed out on several[0][1] privacy focused browser extensions that haphazardly included Wikiless.

[0]: https://framagit.org/tom79/nitterizeme/-/issues/61#note_1122...

[1]: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/issues/232#...

I added the reference link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33101301

Repo is still private and the dev removed all of his updates.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221125051241/https://orenom.fi...

The repo: https://codeberg.org/orenom/wikiless

Good.

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