--- Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
Oh, yes, he does! You just havn't tangled with him before. However in the context of this discussion I took his suggestion as made in good faith as a way to maintain access to Wikipedia in China.
Fred
From: "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 02:45:12 -0700 To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia in China
Christopher Mahan wrote:
Yes, if every other article is about failure of this and
breakdown of
that, with Falung and Commies and Free Tibet all over the place,
I
would shut it down too.
Surely you don't mean that.
--Jimbo
First, Jimbo, I lived in France, and hold french citizenship. France and China have much better relationships with each other than america dreams of. My ant worked for a company that sold nuclear reactors to china in 1982.
Were a bunch or rubbish be written about a great (not perfect) country on an purportedly international, NPOV encyclopedia, and people were adamant that it was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I would feel ashamed and pull the plug myself, hiding away and hoping people would forget my name.
I personally know two mainland chinese. Both are highly educated, cultured, calm and reliable people. I like them much better than some of my american friends. Their country has few true friends, and they've beasically been pulling themselves by their bootstraps for the last 50 years.
The chinese government has realized many years ago that hardline communism is a dead-end. Yet they also know that if they don't present a unified front, a unified face, the world will walk all over them. So they are tought. They appear tough. They want people to think them tough.
Remember that if PyongYang's nukes can reach Tokyo, they can reach Beijing. The chinese know this, and they're flexing their muscles there too.
China is a very large country with 20% of the world's people. They don't give a damn about our little competition with Brittanica. They don't give a damn about Wikipedia. They are fighting prejudice, fear, and misunderstanding on a grander scale, at the UN, in the WTO, and off their coast, with jetfighters.
They do not want to play hardball with us. They have bigger fish to fry. But if we start interfering with their plans for bringing china in the 21st century as a world power and player on an equal footing with the US and Europe, they will cut us off. And I would agree with them.
All I know is that if Wikipedia is fair and balanced, showing in thousands of articles the true face of china today, then the Chinese government will find no reason to block us, and in fact may participate.
===== Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan@yahoo.com chris.mahan@gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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