Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: China goverment maybe blocked wikipedia today

Yes, having en.Wikipedia in China is a wonderfull tool for teachers that have not so many valuable material here. It's also nice for students and I gave mine the links on Chinese versions, explaining them what is a wiki. I sent also links to other teachers in other fields (like Chinese culture, psychology), and some used it as main material for their courses. What westerners may not know is that universities in China are very important in the city life (in Kunming, campuses fill nearly fully the north-west quarter of the city) and the biggest university's dean is often one of the five most influential men around the mayor. Here education is something important, and Chinese gov is focusing a lot on it, because they know that well educated people produce wealth and stability. My claim is that, if something is to be done to lift this ban, I suggest to do it first in a soft way, not using laywers, but try to convince Chinese officials that wikipedia is mainly a wonderfull free tool for educational purposes, that, as far as they agree on "encyclopedic NPOV", /they/ can check it and change articles if they think the content offenses China's integrity or so on. They know perfectly well how to drive such kind of "reading commitee"... Example : There are few pages on "how to write Chinese articles" explaining how to deal with Tawainese problem that would probably fit their demands ("never present Tawain as a nation", and so on... can't find the page now, you know why....) So I suppose the best could be to try to ask them (but who ? thats the problem, see below) which pages they don't like and deal with it, explain them that wikipedia is always under construction and that, with their help, offensive pages will progressively reach npov. The question they could ask is something like "is wikipedia controlable ?" We would answer yes, very easily in 99% cases, using admin tools like locking pages in the other 1%. We could also say that there is a simple and open procedure to become admin on chinese wikipedia... Trying to go too quickly in frontal fight would imho be a mistake. They may want something in exchange if they lift the ban. This "something" could simply be the possibility to participate in the project, what everybody can do ! So "who" is to be contacted ? I have no idea but maybe this article http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-06/10/content_1519843.htm give a direction. See also http://net.China.cn (gbog) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jiong Sheng" <sheng.jiong(a)gmail.com> To: <wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org> Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2004 12:20 PM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: China goverment maybe blocked wikipedia today wrote: How Sichuan.