>That means your traffic never leaves the safely encrypted confines of Tor, keeping it hidden.

Yeah nope. He says it took a half hour to set up, that means it's not using a wiki dump, but fetching it live. That means the traffic is going from his server to wikimedia's servers, same as if you used tor to visit Wikipedia directly.

If wikimedia set this up themselves, it could be true, but this clearly isn't and can't terminate without touching clearnet.

Never trust the news, even when they cite sources and sound like they know what they're talking about.

Bonus: in the linked Twitter thread he specifically says not to trust it, it's just a proof of concept. So of course vice presents it as more secure than the current options

So this is at best exactly as secure as visiting wikipedia directly in a TOR browser? TOR itself operates by routing packets through a hidden layer so that the exit node which talks to the end site doesn't know who is the requestor, just a hidden node address to send data back to. Here he is essentially operating an exit node that only talks to wikipedia.

With aggressive caching it could generate less traffic to wikipedia. So something like it could be marginally useful, at least for reading wikipedia.

That's how it sounded to me too.

Besides that, what's the advantage of having Wikipedia as an onion vs visiting the site from Tor over HTTPS?

Wouldn't that mean you're just adding this onion proxy to your circle of trust and hoping they aren't giving you altered articles or logging accessed articles? How is that better than accessing Wikipedia directly (via Tor and HTTPS)?

Well, there's this already: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway

This is awesome!

This is also not blocked in Turkey!

It would really be nice if there was a pager for it. As it is, the easiest way to use this is to enable logging on your terminal, look up your article, and scroll scroll scroll. Some of these articles are huge.

Vice and Buzzfeed links should be banned.

A very good point. Still, it's raising awareness and is worthwhile as a project.

As you say, hopefully Wikimedia will take note and implement a darknet version themselves.

Downloading the full database (including images) is probably not practical on a daily basis and definitely not if you want full revision history.

Yesterday the government in Pakistan banned Facebook and Twitter while it cracked down on religious protesters. The facebook hidden service [1] has been wonderful for me! I wish more companies opened up hidden services.

[1]: https://facebookcorewwwi.onion

Wait until Pakistan figures out how to ban Tor, like China does.

It’s such a Silicone Valley-centric idea to think behind every social problem is some technical solution. Technical issues aside, a tor-enabled Wikipedia is going to do nothing to help people living under murderous, totalitarian regimes.

You want to help people living in Syria? How about you give them some of your money. A little bit of your own excess will go a lot farther than these half-baked technical “solutions”.

This project is about helping Wikipedia, which is an existing technical project. I don't see anything in his tweets that makes it sound like he's trying to solve some deep social issue.

I'm not sure why this is necessary.

Wikipedia has very strong user privacy policies.