Comments on: Facebook blocked, but Wkipedia Chinese version is now available in China, wtf?

By: Aw Guo

Aw Guo — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 04:03:56 +0000

Oh, you are really a great guy, the editors of Wikipedia are all great.
Okay, thanks for your great interesting and subscribing our RSS :)
Let's keep in touch!

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:45:57 +0000

Hi Lisa - Thanks for checking it out for me. Wonder if it will come back up...

By: Lisa

Lisa — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:34:41 +0000

Hi, Andrew,

Thank you for your kindness and warm heart ! I tried again this morning for times and found I could not reach the Wikipedia in Chinese while I could reach that in English. So..... you can usnderstand some situation here...

Anyway, it is not bad, since I can use it by English. hehe~~

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:35:00 +0000

Is Chinese Wikipedia still available? And if so, is the content the same as the English version? I am somewhat fluent in Chinese and an avid Wikipedia fan, and have been itching to start translating pages over to the severely lacking Chinese version, especially if there are 1.3 billion potential readers =)

What a truly fascinating site guys! I just subscribed and hope to learn a lot from following this site. Let me know if you ever need help with English, translations, or whatever.

By: Clay Smith

Clay Smith — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 04:53:28 +0000

Oh, no. I don't think it's dangerous. It's fascinating to me how governments work, intervening in our lives sometimes and then stepping out other times. The government of my country is frustratingly bureaucratic—it feels like things never get done. They say too many cooks spoil the broth, but I think too many politicians spoil the law-making. I will keep reading, definitely!

By: Clay Smith

Clay Smith — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 04:51:10 +0000

Ah, that helps me to understand. China _does_ boast the largest number of citizens, so I can see how it would be difficult to keep track of all of you. :) I'm glad Wikipedia is back up for y'all. It's pretty useful as long as you take the articles with a grain of salt—because it's edited by everyone on the internet, sometimes the information is a little inaccurate. For instance, I maintain the page that describes my college, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence_Christian_College, along with one of the professors who works there. Any mistakes on the page, I guess, are my fault. :)

By: Lisa

Lisa — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 04:20:59 +0000

Welcome you Clay! I bet if you keep reading here, you can know more about China and we Chinese people....lol

You asked a good question! I am now trying to explain it by my personal understanding on it.

1, The Government is really worried about some bad dissemination, which would lead people to a wrong way. However, it is depend on some individual executors who can make good decision on what is good or bad? I don't think the executors will report to the State Council to get approval for block Wikimedia or Facebook...lol. So, some incredible or laughable things happens here and there.

2, We people in China has got more and more freedom on comment in the open since Reform and Open. Government normally not care about some individual criticism, and also can not prevent so vast comments scattered on the net. However, they can focus their censor and then block some famous and hot websites like Wikimedia and Facebook. If our ifgogo becomes well known and hot visited site, I am sure it would be checked very often. That is what I hope we people here to be careful and not to kill our small green place just by some uselessly impetuous words.

By: Aw Guo

Aw Guo — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:32:51 +0000

Yes, we are, most of use are inside China.
However, in China it's not that "dangerous" as you think. Anyway, we are all brave guys :)
So, please support us, we need your support!

By: Lisa

Lisa — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:11:31 +0000

I could reach facebook the other day when I just heard it was blocked from Aw's post. But nowadays I can not get it via the browser of TheWorld too. I tested N times and ......

So, I can see it is really blocked!

By: Clay Smith

Clay Smith — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:22:55 +0000

Hi, I'm an American and I'm learning Mandarin, so I've been reading the blogs on this site because most of y'all are in my position, only backwards—you speak Chinese, and are learning English. I'm curious. Are y'all blogging from inside China? It strikes me as odd that you can freely talk online about the party's censorship of Facebook and the decision to reverse the block on Wikipedia. If the government can block Facebook because they believe it may disseminate harmful information, doesn't it defeat the purpose if y'all are allowed to criticize the decision on the internet?

Please forgive me, I'm not very well versed on the degree of a person's freedom of expression in China. It's nice to finally comment here, though!