WikiAngela

Partial unblock of Wikipedia in China

Posted by Angela Beesley on October 16, 2006 (Interviews, Politics, Wiki, Wikimedia, Wikipedia)

I’ve gotten completely behind on Wikimedia news over the last week, and I’ve not had time to read Andrew Lih’s blog posts about the partial unblock of Wikipedia in China, nor time to listen to the first episode of the newly launched Wikipedia Weekly which apparently includes a discussion about the unblocking. Wikipedia has an article on this, as will this week’s Wikipedia Signpost.

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.