|
The Chinese Wikipedia is the Chinese language edition of Wikipedia, run by Wikimedia Foundation.
Though the People's Republic of China has adopted a practice of blocking contentious Internet sites, Wikipedia sites have generally been fully accessible to users there. However, Wikimedia sites have been blocked at least twice in its history, and the erratic and uncoordinated nature of these blocks reflect the procedure by which similar blocks are usually administered in China.
The first and most significant block lasted between June 2 and June 21, 2004. It began when access to the Chinese Wikipedia from Beijing was blocked on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
Possibly related to this, on May 31 an article from the IDG News Service was published [1] (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,116323,00.asp), discussing the Chinese Wikipedia's treatment of the protests. The Chinese Wikipedia also has articles related to Taiwanese independence, written by Taiwanese contributors [2] (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-June/015574.html) and others. A few days after the initial block of the Chinese Wikipedia, all Wikimedia sites were blocked in Mainland China. In response to the blocks, Beijing contributors asked their regional ISP to file official forms for lifting the block. All Wikimedia sites were unblocked between June 17 and June 21, 2004.
The second and less serious outage lasted between September 23 and September 27, 2004. During this 4-day period, access to Wikipedia was erratic or unavailable to some users in mainland China — this block was not comprehensive and some users in mainland China were never affected. The exact reason for the block is a mystery, but it may have been linked with the closing down of YTHT BBS, a popular Peking University-based BBS that was shut down a few weeks earlier for hosting overtly radical political discussions; refugees from the BBS had arrived en masse on the Chinese Wikipedia. Chinese Wikipedians once again prepared a written appeal to regional ISP's, but the block was lifted before the appeal was actually sent out; the reasons of which are, once again, a mystery.
The first block had an effect on the vitality of the Chinese Wikipedia, which suffered sharp dips in various indicators (http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaZH.htm) such as the number of new users, the number of new articles, and the number of edits. As of September 2004 many of these stats are still not up to May 2004 levels.
Started in October 2002, the Chinese Wikipedia has over 17,000 articles, as of December 2004.
External link
|
