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

[Jimmy Wales]

I just sent them a response.  But I would also like to hereby authorize
Andrew Lih to make a statement on our behalf, based on usual happy NPOV
talk.

The essential theme of what I have said is that Wikipedia is nonpolitical,
and neutral.  A ban of Wikipedia is not a ban of propaganda or antigovernment
stuff, just a ban of information.




Daniel Mayer wrote:

> --- 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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