[Foundation-l] Wikipedia Inaccessible In China - story hits the news cycle

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote on WikiEN-l:
> WIKIPEDIA Inaccessible In China
> ChinaTechNews.com - Beijing,China
> According to several Internet reports both the Chinese and English-language
> versions of Wikipedia have now been blocked and are inaccessible from
> the Chinese ...
> 
> 
> http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.php?action=show&type=news&id=1316

They specifically mention that the Wikimedia Foundation has not responded yet.
Could somebody who can speak for the foundation do that? I have a feeling that
this story may get big due to the recent rash of censorship in China. Wikipedia
could be lead part of many of those stories since it is hard to feel sorry for
blocked porn and gambling sites but Wikipedia is cute and cuddly and now the
Chinese version has been effectively squashed (with about a hundred
contributors not able to contribute and many thousands disconnected from their
favorite reference site - not to mention hundreds of millions of potential
readers who will never know of us if this block is permanent). I think it is
fairly serious when a very substantial part of the world's population is cut
off from us. 

So we should have an official statement about this before the media starts to
demonize the PRC's censorship policies. IMO, such a statement would need to say
something to the effect that "Wikimedia wants to work with the PRC and we think
that our NPOV policy should take care of any fears the PRC may have." Hopefully
that will give the Chinese contributors a chance to work this out in a soft way
first and give the PRC a way to back off without losing face. We could very
well have been blocked due to bureaucratic misjudgment. 

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


	
		
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