[WikiEN-l] Tearing down the Chinese Firewall

charles matthews charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
Sat May 13 19:11:47 UTC 2006


Prasad J wrote


> As, I said by allowing Chinese Wikipedians (who are probably just kids
> who aren't aware of what exactly their government does to
> "dissidents") will do them more harm than good. You wouldn't be
> breaking any laws, you would just be getting some Chinese teenager
> shot for being a "traitor". America tried to bring democracy to Iraq
> and only succeeded in instigating a civil war.Americans were not put
> on this planet for the express purpose of preserving democracy-why
> don't you give it a rest for a while?

There are good reasons why this list is dedicated to improving the English 
Wikipedia.  Rather than the world situation in general.

The main purpose of Wikipedia can be defined as a (new) kind of publishing, 
namely putting high quality and informative and neutral, factual articles 
into the public domain, under the GFDL.  That is what we do.  This is not 
propaganda.  If it is difficult for people to read them online, there are 
other ways they  can be distributed, such as on a CD-ROM.  It is essentially 
pointless for governments to try to prevent people having some sort of 
access to Wikipedia, short of running the country on the lines of North 
Korea.

I suggest we get back to editing, so that if people have extra difficulty in 
accessing the English Wikipedia, for any reason, it will be all the more 
worth reading in the end.

Charles 





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