----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Mayer" maveric149@yahoo.com

The block seems to have been confirmed, but I'm still not convinced that

it was

entirely intentional. They could have blocked an entire IP range of

spammers or

porn sites and we could have been caught in the cross fire. If that is the

case

then this should be as simple as Jimbo writing the right person in the PRC

to

explain the situation.

Finding the "right person" to write to is probably not so easy, and a direct letter could be lost in administration daedalus. I guess Chinese admins living in Beijing may have more chance to find an open ear in their relationship that could reconsider the ban or at least explain what happend, especially in university context. Mountain (juanml) said they tried to contact people and I'm sure they are doing all what can be done, because Chinese Wikipedia is their "baby", in a way. I'm not Chinese, just living in China, but my little experience of this country tells me that we should leave them manage the problem instead of jumping now on our horses.

My hypothesis about the reason why they probably banned Wikipedia is a fear of this commemoration that recently took place in HK. So maybe all "community" web-site where some words appeared may have been banned in a bunch (it would be interesting to know if other web-sites have been banned and which). One argument for wikipedia could be that it is all but a place where friends discuss about current politics or recent history, even if some articles deal with this topics. It is not a chat room, not a blog, not a nest of political pamphlets, not even a community of interest editable web-page, it's simply an open-content encyclopedia, and that's all.

(gbog)