Slashdot Mirror
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'...
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!
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.
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)
>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