One of the many benefits of the decision to release change.gov under a free license is that it doesn’t matter that the site itself is not yet version controlled since anyone can reuse that content to provide an independent versioning system. Having a third party do the versioning is more trustworthy than versioning on the site itself as it’s so easy, with MediaWiki at least, to secretly remove revisions (a feature known as “oversight” on Wikipedia) and to secretly add revisions. Whilst it would be great if they would use a wiki for the site, that alone would not provide enough transparency to prevent unwanted sections disappearing again.

You can get involved by visiting the wiki at change.wikia.com or by subscribing to the mailing list.

Fred von Lohmann, Senior Intellectual Property Attorney of the EFF, is defending the rights of an anonymous citizen-journalist to link from the public Zyprexa PBWiki to copies of leaked Eli Lilly documents. The documents are related to the controversial prescription drug Zyprexa and, according to the New York Times, show that the company intentionally downplayed the drug’s side effects.

Related links:

• EFF press release
• Motion filed in the litigation
• Court order
• Join the EFF
• More on Wikipedia

Update: 13 February: “Eli Lilly Loses Effort to Censor Zyprexa Documents Off the Internet” – the judge rescinded the injunction against the wiki.

Andrew Lih had some ideas of why the unblock happened, but whatever the reason, the decision seems to have been reversed. See Andrew’s blog for updates and theories on why this happened.

Related posts:

• Partial unblock of Wikipedia in China
• Wikipedia fully unblocked in China and experiencing rapid growth

See also:

• Circumvention methods from the anti-censorship wiki

Tim, on the other hand, has been following the developments of this since the first blocks occured in mid-2004, so I was very happy to hand over my interview requests to him this week. He gave a great interview for ABC’s Connect Asia. You can download the MP3 to listen to it. It lasts 3 minutes and starts about 3 minutes into the recording of the 2nd half of the show.

Here’s a rough transcript…

Zulfikar Abbany: It’s been described as the great firewall of China. It’s the Chinese government’s attempts to stop people accessing certain content online and it’s meant that a number of foreign websites keen to get a stake in the Chinese market have allegedly allowed their output to be censored. The search engines Yahoo! and Google are just two who are said to have done that. The popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which was blocked in china, has now come out saying it’s freely available. Technology correspondent Peter Marks spoke with Wikipedia’s Tim Starling.

Tim Starling: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It’s an open website. It’s free for anyone to use and at the moment we’ve got about 1.4 million articles in the English Wikipedia and quite a bit more than that if you add all the other languages together.

Peter Marks: Now, because anyone can edit a page on Wikipedia, I imagine that there are politic hot topics in there that have polarised views of what the story should be. How does Wikipedia resolve these sorts of tensions?

Tim Starling: We have a policy that we call the “Neutral Point of View”. What that basically says is our articles should be unbiased and we should present all points of view so we do that basically by a consensus of editors. So, one statement of the Neutral Point of View policy is that an article should be such that even your worst enemy will agree with it.

Peter Marks: Some governments are very sensitive about certain issues and China is obviously well known for blocking sites than mention Falun Gong or the Tiananmen Square massacre. Does Wikipedia ever censor or hide pages to appease certain governments?

Tim Starling: No, we don’t, and certainly there’s absolutely nothing like that going on on the foundation level. It’s possible that some of the Chinese Wikipedians themselves engaged in some self-censorship to try to reduce the amount of blocking by the Chinese government, but there’s certainly nothing on an official level. I think the Chinese people themselves are a bit more relaxed about that sort of thing that we in the west might be.

Peter Marks: Other sites though, notably Google and Yahoo!, have agreed to censor search results, but Wikipedia hasn’t needed to do that?

Tim Starling: With Wikipedia, it would be very hard for us to do any sort of censorship like that because Wikipedia isn’t just a content delivery site, there’s also discussion and we have also have this instant publishing aspect, so it’s very hard for us to censor what the users want to say. The Chinese government, for a while, just blocked sensitive articles in Wikipedia. They can actually block particular articles and leave most of the site intact, but since last year they decided to block the entire site – a blanket ban – and I think that’s probably more to do with that open discussion and instant publishing than because of any particular article content.

Peter Marks: Do you have any idea why it might have been unblocked at the moment?

Tim Starling: The Chinese language version is still blocked apparently so it’s a small step really. They’ve unblocked all the other languages. And really, who can say why they did that? Maybe it was a compromise within the party somewhere. The processes of the bureaucracy are complex.

I’m giving a talk today for the Students of Sustainability conference at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. The conference website includes this extract from freepress.net:

“when viewpoints are cut off and ideas cannot find an outlet, our democracy suffers.”

When votes come up on the site, a common opposition to those votes is that Wikipedia is not a democracy. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not important to democracy, and the inclusion of viewpoints that the NPOV policy tries to ensure may be helpful to this.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wiki gain so much interest in under two days. 248 registered users have edited the site and 452 people have subscribed to the mailing list. There was so much traffic on the list, we had to make a separate announcements-only list.

The project has already been written about on Slashdot (and survived). It is mentioned on hundreds of blogs and is on all sorts of sites, from LinuxWorld and ZDNet to The Seattle Times.

What the wiki really needs now is some experienced wiki users to bring it some structure (it’s a scary tangle of discussion mixed with everything at the moment), and more ideas to feed into the ongoing discussion about what this wiki is for.

From the Mission Statement:

“It’s time for politics to become more intelligent, and for democracy to really involve the people. Broadcast media tells you what to think and doesn’t let you get involved. It’s time to focus on what you need, what you care about, and the messages you want to get out.”