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China Unblocks Wikipedia
ZZeta writes "Even though the information on the site is still scarce, Editor & Publisher is already publishing the scoop: Apparently, Wikipedia has been unblocked in China. From the article: 'Wikipedia reported on its site that it had received word from multiple users in the country on Chinese-forums.com that the site had been restored.'"
Yup, especially as the majority of links are to en.wikipedia.org, zh.wikipedia.org is still blocked. I just had a friend in China hit the main page of both wikis and only en. was available. Now to get her to run a search on 'Tibet'...
This is great news for Chinese internet users. So what if the pages on a few political topics are unreliable? Wikipedia is not the only source on the internet, its just a very useful resource on general knowledge. General knowledge includes a lot of things that aren't these political issues. At least today they have a larger resource.
I think that the internet will eventually triumph over the Chinese governments censorship. There are a lot of people in China, and its hard to keep that many people, most of them poor, stable. You can see from the last hundred years how many large revolutions there have been. The country has been slowly, but steadily progressing towards freedom. Opening up their economy, moving towards capitalism are some of the bigger steps. Allowing wikipedia is a good step in the right direction.
All that said I am in favor of all the software and efforts to help Chinese people blog anonymously. I believe the more communication the better, the fourth estate serves the government and the internet helps subvert that.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
A quick test of certain articles indicates the government has moved to more fine grained blocking. The page of some events 17 years ago did not load, but trying to load it did not temporarily block the ip(which is what happens if it just stalls on banned words). So I guess they have decided that cencoring all of wikipedia is overkill..
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tienamen_square
t ests_of_1989 is blocked
The protests of 1989 resulted in the killing of Chinese protestors in the streets to the west of the square and adjacent areas. Some sources (Graham Earnshaw and Columbia Journal Review) claim that none died on the square itself. However, Chinese expatriates who left the country after the killings said that the numbers ended up being in the thousands. This was a combination of the hundreds killed on the spot and the "miniature" purge that followed.
But http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_pro
Interesting... More than I expected to be avaliable...
Did the Chinese government just realize they can hire a million-strong standing army of Wikipedia editors? Why censor when you can edit to taste?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Do Chinese users have a Chinese language Wikipedia, or do they use the English one?
I can't imagine the Chinese even remotely allowing it's citizens to view articles about the Dalai Lama for example, or anything that seems pro-Taiwan.
English, Tiananmen Square http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_square/ (Wikipedia.org) Chineese,http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A9%E5 %AE%89%E9%97%A8%E5%B9%BF%E5%9C%BA (zh.Wikipedia.org )
Scroll down to events or where it would be (navigate by pictures, its the one by the flag) on the chinese site, the chinese site is missing a link to this page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_prot ests_of_1989/ (wikipedia.org) among others
and i dought that they will ever take a hose to their firewall.(of doom!!!) well,I guess mod me down
-Prometheus
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. - Issac Asimov
I've been in China for 3 and a half years now and this is good news indeed, but there is still a long way to go. Considering how many times Google has been blocked and unblocked since I've been here, I wouldn't be surprised to find Wikipedia blocked again soon. I still have to play the proxy server game to surf a lot of the sites I want to see, and they have gotten very good at outsmarting proxy servers for certain content they absolutely don't want people to see. Maybe someone can enlighten me how they would be able to block a site even if it's going through an anonymous proxy server in, say Korea. I'm sure they have the brightest of the brightest hard at work on it. Of course, no proxy server ever works for more than a few days before it gets added to the "list". In fact, I'm probably on more than a few lists, myself. Lists only matter if they need evidence for something, and as I'm not inciting anything, I'm not particularly worried. I count my blessings that I have as much freedom to do what I want here as I do. In fact, I feel far more free to express myself here than I did back in the States, with its citizen watchdogs doing their best at every turn to censor me.
The GP mentioned users who *visted* the Wikipedia, not edited, but editing might be more incriminating as well as easier to track. Tracking down the IP address would be the easiest way to do such snooping automagically, but there are probably clues to be gleaned from the information the contributor adds to the 'pedia themselves...
A thought occurs - the Wikipedia is a fairly well known site, like CNN, New York Times, etc. Unlike many blocked and well known news and politics sites, the content is created by the users. If the Wikipedia is blocked by the PRC, then the Chinese langauge version is being edited by Chinese speakers (or writer, rather) from outside of the PRC, and those in the PRC that have managed to break through the Great Firewall. The resulting content would probably not be too favorable to the PRC.
Unblocking the Wikipedia would allow PRC loyalists to edit, improving the PRC's image, as well as providing the government an opportunity to conduct "counter-intelligence" on those who aren't so loyal.
Yeah, I meant the comment to be funny; I'm flabergasted that it was modded insightful.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
In other words, a very few rich aristocrats in 14th and 15th century Europe decided one day that a certain set of values like 'rule by the people', 'scientific inquiry and understanding', 'free press' and the like were great in theory and it would be kinda neat if someone tried them. A few hundred years later one rabblerousing asshat or two actually took them seriously and started revolutions on both sides of the pond. Since the crazy fuckers actually won a few times, we, a few hundred years after that, have come to reflexively believe that these ideological precepts are somehow universally good, since they worked out so well for us. They are embedded very deeply in our cultural vocabulary.
GP's point, I imagine, had something to do with China having been around and doing A-OK in one form or another for the last three thousand years operating under entirely different assumptions, ideologies, and whatnot than the west. What make us so arrogant to think that because our stuff, like freedom of information, works so well for us, that it would for them or that they would even want it at all?
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Do not be fooled by this and other magnanimous gestures. China will be back to her dictatorial self once the Olympics is finished in 2008.
Don't forget that government IP addresses were blocked after visitors from them made many changes to make government officials look better. Most likely those people are still doing it, just not from the same IP addresses. It's not nearly as bad as blocking Wikipedia, but it's something to keep in mind.
"Yep, I too can confirm the site is accessible from inside China."
Don't know where you are, but here in Qingdao, Shandong province; nothing wikipedia is accesible.
Seems like they just open it in a few places, to get the western media to report how open they are before the olympics. ****ing ***holes!
MikMik Baby Organics Mikkaworks
Well, reporters who aren'tin danger of being tossed into a cell with people suffering from tuberculosis have a different view. Keep in mind that here in the west, we have access not only to our own country's take on events, we can read the accounts from the Red Dynasty's propagandists as well. Guess which side I find convincing?
Hell, most Chinese don't even know that Mao killed more Chinese than Tojo.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
>At least, having large parts of the population regularly starve is far from my personal definition of "A-OK".
:)
Are we talking about the same China? Do you mean to say that if we penciled out a simple timeline covering the last 3000 years, and then made a short list of major cultures that existed for at least that long, we would find China as a lone example of one where the shear statistical majority of the population suffered significantly as a direct and sustained result of starvation...?
In contrast to your claim that the Chinese at-large served as a benchmark for lack of sustenance... on more than one occasion, while large populations in Europe were fading into history due to starvation alone, much larger populations were busy sustaining themselves in this part of Asia. It is a common myth that the Chinese are a nation of farmers - in truth, the Chinese are 'water people', having relied on rivers and the ocean for both mobility and food supply throughout their history, continuing even now.
Do you know just how many cultures have come and gone over the last 3000 years, versus how many have remained?
The Chinese relate to a time scale that they alone are comfortable with. China tends to open and close on 500 year cycles. How can any short-lived culture, such as modern America with less than 300 years to look back on, begin to even comprehend what it takes to stick around for 3000? What is a significant amount of time to an American, say 50 years, is not so much as a blink for the Chinese spirit. While Americans measure history in generations (1 = 37 years), the Chinese measure things in dynasties, as an example, with minor segments being ticked off every 150 years or so.
It was very nearly 500 years ago when Chinese mariners mapped the globe, only to be wiped off the seating chart by the Mandarins, who decried science, and did everything they could to erase all they feared from the rise of practical science.
Now, 500 years hence, we find China clearing her throat...she has led the world in technology many times before, and she wants that position back. Your claim of starvation getting in their way is a bit funny, seeing as they are still around, after all those years
>The chinese did not have science.
:)
Right...this must be more of the old myth that the ancestry of modern science is exclusively European.
Sure, if you are willing to discount the sextant, the sundail, extant writing, cast bronze acupunture training dummies, gun-powder, movable type...you've chosen to use the already centuries stale F. Bacon method of narrowly defining science so as to give credit to cultures that followed on the heals of the Chinese by centuries.
A grand laugh then and a grand laugh now...thanks for taking a run at me, but if you intend to make your points by re-writing and/or ignoring factual history, I'll consider your involvement in this thread as a weak attempt at humor
Inventions != Science
In fact, many of man's greatest inventions are accidents. The Chinese were advanced technologically compared to their peers until at least the 1700's, but that doesn't mean that they (or their peers) used the scientific method. For instance, they have been curing a type of leukemia for years (centuries?) using folk medicine comprised of ground rock, toad poison, and some herbs. The cure rate was better than Western chemotherapy methods, which were ineffective against this form of leukemia, but the "cure" was pretty deadly itself. A team of western scientists went over there in the hopes of finding the active ingredient that was curing the cancer. The toad poison was so complex that it thwarted analysis, so they went after the other ingredients first. Guess what? They found out that the ground rock contained a lot of arsenic, and that was what was curing the cancer. The herbs, the toad poison - all bullshit. So while the Chinese were ahead of western medicine technologically, they had no idea why they were using the ingredients that they were - absolutely not scientific in the least. Had they had any shred of the scientific method ingrained in their culture, they would have tried the ingredients separately and had a much less toxic cure.
Also, why does everyone think that the Chinese culture of today is like that of 3000 years ago? Was not Marx a westerner? Does anyone remember the cultural revolution? Why are the Chinese that live on Taiwan, or Singapore, or Hong Kong not counted as Chinese in this discussion? They have (or had) pretty decent versions of democracy and have done pretty well, too. Chinese are just humans - there is nothing special about them. Same as Americans. Do any of you actually know or work with any Chinese people? Have any of you actually been there?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This is completely ignored in the reference you came with. The way of thinking underlying science is completely ignored, instead focusing on certain surface-level artifacts. In other words: Ignoring historical fact and ignoring the nature of science, instead attempting to broaden the definition of science to include all forms of knowledge and all forms of technology. In the reference you provide, astrology is considered a science, at which point you've obviously diverged from the definition any scientist would use.
As far as I can tell, you are doing a post-modern rewrite of history, based (as usual) on not understanding how modern scientific processes work and what distinguish them.
Read the reference I provided you to learn more of what science is and how it historically occured. There is an influx of knowledge from the Chinese, sure, but the idea that they had science rests on not understanding scientific process and human psychology (confirmation bias and how unnatural scientific thinking is).
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.