We should wait a few days to find out how widespread the "block" is first before coming up with an official response. This was discussed in the #wikimedia IRC channel as well.
In the long run, hopefully the Internet authorities will realize that having Wikipedia accessible in the PRC is generally a good thing. This is basically why Google was unblocked two years ago. So instead of a complete ban, general URL-based "blocking" by their filters would be good enough to cut out what they find problematic. PRC Internet blocking takes place in different tiers - DNS blocking entire site names, URL-based blocking based on keywords, E-mail screening for keywords, etc.
As I mentioned to Jimbo in June's London meetup, the Internet authorities work in a way that resemble how administrators work in Wikipedia - it is a distributed team of folks making decisions, and one department may disagree with another and have a block lifted.
I'm not sure WP admins like being compared to the PRC authorities, however. :)
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 12:05:05 -0600, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
Maybe, but there may be an article, [[censorship]]. What goes in that?
Fred
From: Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 10:46:55 -0700 (PDT) To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia in China
--- Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
All the things you suggest are good and no problem for the government. I have absolutely no problem with writing about all those good things. But the focus of the government is going to be on things like that BBS that got shut down. Should there be no article? A syncopathic article explaining why it was necessary to shut it down from the government viewpoint? Or an article from a Neutral point of view?
No article at all. It is truly insignificant, if you think about it. When there are 350,000 articles in Chinese about Chinese history, politics, culture and religions, then, a small blurb about efforts by the central govt to curb radicalism that impacted a small number of computer users (anything less than 10 million is small in china.) would be called for.
Let's not focus on the twisted twig while standing in a large forest.
===== Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan@yahoo.com chris.mahan@gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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