Wikipedia: A quick chat on the move to https

Recently Wikipedia announced it was migrating to **secure browsing across all its sites** . We caught up with the official spokesperson of the Wikimedia Foundation for a quick chat to find out more. What were factors that influenced the migration to default https? I should clarify that HTTPS is not new to Wikimedia sites. In 2011, we began working on the infrastructure and technical requirements, as well as understanding the policy and community implications of HTTPS, with the ultimate goal of making it available as the default to all users. Because of this work, for the past four years, all Wikimedia users have been able to access our sites with HTTPS manually, through HTTPS Everywhere, and when directed to our sites from the major search engines. Additionally, since 2013, all logged in users have been accessing our sites via HTTPS by default. We are now implementing HTTPS across all Wikimedia sites for all users because we believe everyone should be able to access information, without censorship and without sacrificing privacy. The HTTPS protocol makes it more difficult for governments and other third parties to monitor traffic. It also prevents censorship by making it harder for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to information, for example specific Wikipedia articles. We waited until all our teams felt fully capable of accomplishing this task. Also, with increasing concerns about government surveillance over the last few years, the Wikimedia movement has pushed for more broad protection through HTTPS by default. Does this come at an added cost to Wikimedia? As I’ve mentioned, this has been a process spanning many years, and we are now taking the final step to implement HTTPS by default for all users. We’ve realized that we are in a place to do this securely and with as few technical problems as possible. Our engineering and operations teams have been fully equipped to handle this transition, so at this stage there is no ‘added cost’ to the Foundation. Can you share some details about government surveillance, especially India? The transition to HTTPS was undertaken because we want to ensure secure and private access for all Wikimedia users around the world, not in any one particular country. The Wikimedia Foundation believes in equal access to the Internet because it is integral to our mission of providing free knowledge around the world. However, the move to HTTPS is about making sure access to free knowledge is secure and uncensored. If you’d like to see what countries have made requests to censor Wikipedia content, you can reference our transparency report that shows the types of requests we receive and from whom. We don’t have statistics available on other specific activities.