The Wiki is Back
If you haven’t already heard, the Chinese government has apparently unblocked Wikipedia here.
I failed to notice this initially as I’ve been viewing the encyclopedia through a mirror, but when I saw this article in my Slashdot news feed today, I punched up the site, and it loaded without problem. Not surprisingly, certain “sensitive terms” still fail to load, but everything else seems to be intact. I can’t get through to the Chinese language version, but that’s apparently not a measure being taken at the national level. At any rate, the end of this block marks the cessation of the third blocking of Wikipedia in the PRC’s history.
The Party isn’t one to explain why these blocks begin or end, so it’s anyone’s guess why Beijing decided to let Wikipedia back through this time around. I have to wonder, though, if they didn’t finally take notice of how damaging it would be to keep China cut off from the largest source of free (in every sense of the word) information in the world.
The Chinese language version of Wikipedia has certainly stagnated under the Internet blocks, and the numbers paint a shameful picture of the Chinese contribution to this collection of knowledge:
At 94,117 articles, the Chinese Wikipedia is not even a third the size of the Polish Wikipedia, despite the fact that China (including a certain island) has roughly twelve times as many Internet users.
While Chinese search engine Baidu’s “Baidu Baike” wiki-like encylopedia has crested 400,000 articles, that service is not truly as “free” as Wikipedia. It lacks Wikipedia’s non-profit orientation, seems to certify all submitted content as copyrighted by Baidu, and in some instances, lifts directly from Wikipedia.
Hopefully this change of heart on Wikipedia sticks and the Chinese people can again get started on catching up with the rest of the developed world on this endeavour.
Are the non-English versions unique or are they just translations of the English pages?
↓ Quote | Posted October 12, 2006, 10:35 am[…] By the benevolent grace of The Nanny we are again allowed to use Wikipedia. “Please Nanny, may I have another?” […]
↓ Quote | Posted October 12, 2006, 11:08 pmShaun, the other language versions of Wikipedia are indeed separate communities of varying size and content. Translation occurs in all directions between these Wikipedias, as some content will necessarily be more developed in certain languages than in others (ex: French topics will be best addressed on the French Wikipedia).
↓ Quote | Posted October 13, 2006, 2:04 amif the CCP wanted to, they could basically shut down wikipedia.
hire 500 recovering PC gamers with some English skills, put them in a coverted factory, and instruct them to edit every page where ‘China’ appears.
wikipedia is an interesting resource but very fragile in my opinion. if it ever became vogue to vandalize a wiki - it would be all over but the crying.
↓ Quote | Posted October 13, 2006, 11:41 amIt’s not as simple as that. Wikipedia admins can ban users’ ability to edit Wikipedia if such users abuse the service (this is done by user name or IP address). These bans can be as short as a few hours or indefinite. Furthermore, proxy services like Tor are usually banned from editing by default. Lastly, restoring vandalism is as simple as clicking on the last good version of a page, as Wikipedia save a copy of every edit version of each page.
↓ Quote | Posted October 13, 2006, 7:45 pmGoogle cache also comes in handy when you want to view a page as it looked in the past. Unfortunately for China you can’t change the past.
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