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

Mon Jun 14 10:12:27 UTC 2004

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>

> The block seems to have been confirmed, but I'm still not convinced that
it was
> entirely intentional. They could have blocked an entire IP range of
spammers or
> porn sites and we could have been caught in the cross fire. If that is the
case
> then this should be as simple as Jimbo writing the right person in the PRC
to
> explain the situation.

Finding the "right person" to write to is probably not so easy, and a direct
letter could be lost in administration daedalus. I guess Chinese admins
living in Beijing may have more chance to find an open ear in their
relationship that could reconsider the ban or at least explain what happend,
especially in university context. Mountain (juanml) said they tried to
contact people and I'm sure they are doing all what can be done, because
Chinese Wikipedia is their "baby", in a way. I'm not Chinese, just living in
China, but my little experience of this country tells me that we should
leave them manage the problem instead of jumping now on our horses.

My hypothesis about the reason why they probably banned Wikipedia is a fear
of this commemoration that recently took place in HK. So maybe all
"community" web-site where some words appeared may have been banned in a
bunch (it would be interesting to know if other web-sites have been banned
and which). One argument for wikipedia could be that it is all but a place
where friends discuss about current politics or recent history, even if some
articles deal with this topics. It is not a chat room, not a blog, not a
nest of political pamphlets, not even a community of interest editable
web-page, it's simply an open-content encyclopedia, and that's all.

(gbog)