Blocking of Wikipedia in the People's Republic of China

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As closures of Wikipedia in mainland China , a series of access barriers of different language editions is Wikipedia and other Wikimedia -projects in the People's Republic of China , respectively. The government and internet providers of the People's Republic of China have blocked access to Wikipedia several times from the territory of the People's Republic of China as part of internet censorship in the People's Republic of China . The access blocks work like a content filter . The self-governing territories of Hong Kong and Macau are not affected by the lockdowns. Internet offers from the Wikimedia Foundation have so far been blocked four times in China. Access to the Chinese language version of Wikipedia has been completely blocked since May 19, 2015. All language versions of Wikipedia have been blocked since April 2019.

Lock

First lock

The first ban began on June 2, 2004 and lasted until June 21, 2004. At the beginning, access to Wikipedia was blocked from Beijing. The 15th anniversary of the Tian'anmen massacre was within the lockdown period .

Presumably in connection with the incident, the IDG News Service published an article dealing with the perspective of the article on the Tian'anmen Square massacre in Chinese Wikipedia . The Chinese-language edition of Wikipedia contains articles considered controversial by the Chinese government, including Taiwan independence , Falun Gong , the Tian'anmen massacre, and other topics. A few days after the Chinese Wikipedia was blocked, all Wikipedia editions in China were blocked. As a result of the blocking, two administrators of the Chinese Wikipedia contacted their internet providers and confirmed that the Wikimedia sites had been blocked. The provider China Science & Technology Net was ready to support an appeal to lift the locks. On June 15, 2004, the two administrators presented a petition stating that Wikipedia was politically neutral and neutral and that it would allow foreigners access to Chinese culture . They compared the treatment of issues considered controversial by the government with treatment in other Chinese encyclopedias, adding that the ban would prevent them from removing factually incorrect entries. All Wikimedia sites were unblocked between June 17 and June 21, 2004.

At no time was there a statement from the responsible authorities for the ban. The blockage disrupted the operation of the Chinese Wikipedia lastingly. The number of new employees, the number of new articles and the number of edits all fell sharply. It took 6 to 12 months for the figures in all areas to return to the May 2004 level.

Second lock

The second ban lasted from September 23 to September 27, 2004. During these four days, access to Wikipedia was partially or completely impossible for some users in China. The lock was not fully implemented, and some users in China were not affected. The reason for the ban is unknown. Presumably there is a connection to the closure of YTHT BBS , a well-known BBS from Peking University . YTHT BBS had been closed a few weeks earlier because, according to the responsible authorities, it had openly contained radical political discussions. Many former users of the YTHT BBS began to participate in the Chinese language Wikipedia. The Chinese Wikipedia staff prepared a petition to Internet providers . The ban was lifted before the petition was sent out.

Third lock

The third ban began on October 19, 2005. Almost a year later, on October 10, 2006, the ban was partially lifted. The provider confirmed the imposition of a ban. The authorities did not disclose the reason for the ban.

In response to the ban, the main page of Chinese Wikipedia published an invitation to users who broke the ban to post a status report on the status of their access. Various employees from different parts of China reported that they could only reach the main page of Chinese Wikipedia with a proxy server .

On October 21, 2005, an administrator asked his provider in a further petition that “the block should be lifted within a week.” An employee of the provider promised to forward his complaint to the responsible office. On October 24, the complainant announced that

“The ban would be lifted on Wednesday [October 26th]. According to a procedure, the details of which are unknown, a petition will be answered within 3 days of submission, an answer will come in three working days, and my petition was sent to their provider on Friday. My provider has indicated that they are not aware of any such case in which a petition was answered negatively. That should be good news, but it's still impossible to find out the reason for the ban. "

“The most effective approach is not to push [this project] out of this country, but to actively participate in it. If we block Wikipedia we will lose a way to speak to the world with a Chinese voice and allow forces such as evil cults and the Taiwanese independence movement to control the development of that content in this project to show the world an ambiguous picture of China. As users, we lose a channel through which we can access knowledge, a channel whose importance is steadily increasing. Such an act is no different from removing our voice and tongue, or closing our eyes and ears. It is closing the doors of our country in the age of the Internet. "

On the morning of October 31, 2005, at 8 a.m. Chinese Standard Time ( UTC + 8 ), employees from all over China began reporting that they could access Wikipedia without using a proxy server. Originally it was assumed that the lock had been lifted. A little later it became known that the alleged lifting of the block was based on the use of a LVS load balancer in front of the squid balancer in the Korean server cluster , which changed the IP address of the Wikimedia pages for users in China and thus circumvented the block. Normal access to Wikipedia became impossible again within a few hours.

There was brief discussion about self-censorship . However, self-censorship was not introduced because censorship of any kind violates Wikipedia's principles.

Fourth lock

On May 19, 2015, access to the encrypted and unencrypted Chinese language version of Wikipedia was blocked.

Unlocks and re-locks

In April 2006, the Chinese search engine Baidu founded the Chinese -language Internet encyclopedia Baidu Baike, which is based on Wikipedia . Baidu Baike implements the Chinese government's censorship regulations.

On June 15, the ban on the English language Wikipedia and other editions was lifted except for a few "sensitive" articles. The lock on the Chinese Wikipedia remained in place. On July 25, 2007, the ban on the Chinese language Wikipedia was lifted. The number of blocked articles increased from then on. Article talk pages and links to news were also blocked. Chinese users who attempted to access a blocked article on the English language Wikipedia or an article on the Chinese Wikipedia were prevented from accessing a Wikimedia page for sixty seconds.

On August 30, 2007, the Chinese Wikipedia was unblocked.

On August 31, 2007, all editions of Wikipedia were blocked.

As of October 10, 2006, conflicting reports began to arrive from different parts of China about the possibility of the ban being lifted. The first report came from a weblogger in Liuzhou , Guangxi , who reported his discovery on a forum on October 10, 2006 at 6:00 pm. Accessibility seemed to depend on the location and provider. This was apparently the result of a finer-grain lock. According to reports from bloggers in China, China Netcom allowed access to English Wikipedia from its DSL network in Beijing, but forbade access to Chinese Wikipedia. The DSL networks of China Telecom in Shanghai and CETC-CHINACOMM Communications Co. Ltd in Beijing allowed access to the English and Chinese Wikipedia. Various providers in Anhui blocked access to the Chinese Wikipedia, but not the English edition. Slashdot Forum users from Beijing reported that they could access the article on Tiananmen Square, Tiananmen Square , which includes a section on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, or access the article on Tiananmen Square protests of In 1989, however, the English-language Wikipedia on the protests and the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989 was denied. According to a similar report, access to the English language Wikipedia article democracy was possible while access to the article Falun Gong was denied. Reporters Without Borders reported that the English version of Wikipedia can be accessed without restriction, while the Chinese version is not accessible to most Chinese. The organization criticized the government's actions as aimed at: "appeasing critics abroad while continuing to censor information for their own people"; at the same time the organization congratulated "those who support Wikipedia, especially Jimmy Wales ". Users indicated that other editions, including German-language Wikipedia , Japanese Wikipedia, and Korean Wikipedia , are available.

On November 10, 2006, weblogger Andrew Lih reported that the Chinese Wikipedia was apparently completely released. Lih confirmed the full suspension of the ban a few days later and published an analysis of the impact on Chinese Wikipedia. Before the blocking, 300 to 400 new user accounts were created every day. In the four days after the unblocking, the number of new user accounts tripled to over 1,200 per day, making the Chinese-language Wikipedia the second fastest growing edition after the English edition. At the same time, in the week that ended on November 13, 2006, 75% more articles were created than in the previous week. On the same weekend, the number of articles on Chinese Wikipedia rose to over 100,000. Lih predicted that the number of articles would soon exceed 200,000, but that Wikipedia's staff in China would be mainly occupied with familiarizing new employees with Wikipedia's principles and norms.

On November 16, 2006, the Reuters news agency reported that the main page of China's Wikipedia could be accessed and that searching for non-political terms was yielding results, but some topics, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre, were still blocked. Chinese and English Wikipedia were reportedly blocked again the next day, November 17th. It is not known whether the lifting of the blockade was the result of technical problems with the so-called Great Firewall of China or other reasons.

2008

The ban was lifted on April 2, 2008.

On April 5, 2008, access to the Chinese Wikipedia from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou was difficult. The Chinese Wikipedia was completely blocked on April 6, 2008. Attempts to access the Chinese Wikipedia lead to a 60-second ban on access to Wikimedia sites. Employees could log in by using https. All other issues were not blocked, subjects like Tibet were still blocked.

On July 31, 2008, The Register reported that access to the Chinese Wikipedia had been released again. The report has been endorsed by the BBC and repeatedly covered by journalists who were in Beijing during the 2008 Summer Olympics . Websites such as the BBC's Chinese website were released following talks between the IOC and the Chinese organizers of the Olympic Games.

In September 2008, Wikimedia Foundation Chairman Jimmy Wales met with Cai Mingzhao , Vice Director of the National Information Agency, whose Internet Administration Department is responsible for censoring Internet content. No agreements were made, Wales believed that a channel of communication had been opened between Wikipedia and the Chinese government.

2015

As of May 19, 2015, according to the Huffington Post , the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia is blocked again in the People's Republic of China. The results on GreatFire.org show that DNS spoofing is used in this lockdown. Wikipedia's main founder, Jimmy Wales, stated on December 2, 2015 that he wanted to fly to Beijing to get the Wikipedia unblocked removed, but the ban widened as a result. All other versions of Wikipedia, including German and English, have been blocked.

2017

Currently (as of October 22, 2017) the German and English versions are not blocked, but the Chinese version is still.

2019

Before the 30th anniversary of the Tian'anmen massacre, the ruling China blocked access to Wikipedia in all languages ​​at the end of April 2019, the Chinese version even earlier. The search engine Google, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well as WhatsApp have been blocked since mid-May at the latest; also the news sites of the “New York Times” and “Wall Street Journal” and, from the point of view of the censors, politically sensitive or China-critical websites.

If you want to bypass the blockages, you need a VPN tunnel . "Above all, before important political events and for the government's sensitive days of commemoration, the authorities take stronger action against these protected connections by severely disrupting them," reports orf.at.

Mirror pages

The lockdowns sparked a controversial debate over whether Wikipedia staff in China should build their own censored version of Chinese Wikipedia. The majority rejected self-censorship. Censorship is also incompatible with the basic principles of Wikipedia. Censorship was often exercised by volunteer-run Spiegel sites . Most of these mirror pages take over the content of the Chinese Wikipedia (thus mirror it). Terms such as the Tiananmen Square protests or Falun Gong were not reported.

The government's stance on these sides is unknown. In April 2008, one of the most famous mirror sites Wikientry.cn in China was blocked even though the site was censored. The reason for the ban is unknown.

Other sites like Miniwiki.org, which also allow editing in the Chinese Wikipedia, operate under the condition of the so-called NPOV (No political point of view) in order to censor most articles on Chinese politics. This use of the term NPOV is not with the equally as NPOV designated Neutral Point of View to be confused. This term describes the principle of Wikipedia to present all topics from a neutral, objective point of view. According to the operators of www.Miniwiki.org, “Wikipedia itself should never exercise censorship. If the censorship is necessary for any reason, mirror pages should carry it out. "

Sites like Answers.com have archived articles that can also be accessed.

Others

The blocking of Wikipedia in China encouraged the spread of proxy software. If a ban is imposed, users in companies outside of China, especially from Hong Kong and Macao, are mostly affected, as business partners network their networks with the networks of other offices in China and Internet traffic is also carried out via these networks. In the event of a lock, Wikipedia cannot be accessed by computers that are networked in this way. This prevents any important information from being obtained.

Bypassing the locks

Technically competent Internet users in China can easily overcome the block, an anonymous proxy server is often used. However, this only makes it possible to view Wikipedia; Editing of articles at least from the English language Wikipedia is then not possible, as the operating rules of Wikipedia prohibit editing from open proxy servers. Many Wikipedia administrators block open proxy servers so that even registered users cannot make any edits from them. Users can view archived versions of articles by using a non-censored mirror (such as www.Answers.com).

Some users use the mobile phones with Windows Mobile built-in translation software to the Wikipedia article, Wikinews , Wiktionary and other Wikimedia content .mfx in documents with the format to convert. These documents can be downloaded and read offline on the mobile phone.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Philip P. Pan: The Great Firewall of China: A Battle Over Ideas Washingtonpost.com, February 19, 2006
  2. ^ Chinese Build Free Net Encyclopedia . PC WORLD. Retrieved February 15, 2011.
  3. a b c https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/19/AR2006021901335.html
  4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/19/AR2006021901335_4.html
  5. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2308907/wikipedia-founder-expects-block-to-be-lifted-in-china.html
  6. ^ Wikipedia Signpost, a communication organ of the English language Wikipedia
  7. 百科 原则 . Baidu Baike. Retrieved December 24, 2006.
  8. English Wikipedia unblocked in China . Retrieved June 20, 2007.
  9. Dan knows
  10. ^ Steven Schwankert: Wikipedia Blocked in China Again , IDG News via PCworld. September 6, 2007. Retrieved January 26, 2008. 
  11. "Wikipedia Unblocked?" thread . Chinese-forums.com. Retrieved December 24, 2006.
  12. China PARTIALLY unblocks Wikipedia . andrewlih.com blog. Archived from the original on December 1, 2006. Retrieved December 24, 2006.
  13. ^ "I'm In Beijing and Here I Go ..." . Slashdot user perfectly normal beast. Retrieved December 24, 2006.
  14. "Wikipedia unblocked, but is Nanny throttling Youtube uploads?" . DANWEI blog user. Retrieved December 24, 2006.
  15. "China: Government unblocks access to Wikipedia's English-language version" . Retrieved December 24, 2006.
  16. "Chinese Wikipedia now fully unblocked?" . andrewlih.com blog. Archived from the original on June 24, 2007. Retrieved December 24, 2006.
  17. ^ "Chinese Wikipedia's Surge in Growth" . andrewlih.com blog. Archived from the original on September 30, 2007. Retrieved December 24, 2006.
  18. "Wikipedia unblocked in China after year-long ban" . Reuters. Retrieved December 24, 2006.
  19. ^ "The Nanny changes her mind: Wikipedia blocked again" . DANWEI. Retrieved December 24, 2006.
  20. ^ Sylvie Barak: China uncensors Wikipedia , The Inquirer. April 3, 2008. Retrieved April 3, 2008. 
  21. ^ Cade Metz: Chinese net censors unblock BBC, Wikipedia . The Register. July 1, 2008. Accessed July 31, 2008.
  22. "Beijing unblocks BBC Chinese site" , BBC, 31 July 2008
  23. http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2008/10/jimmy-wales-mee.html
  24. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charlie-smith/we-had-our-arguments-but-_b_7610130.html
  25. https://en.greatfire.org/https/zh.wikipedia.org
  26. http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/wikipedia-boss-to-lobby/2312740.html
  27. Archived copy ( Memento from December 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  28. Test if a site is blocked in China
  29. China blocks Wikipedia online lexicon in all languages ​​- This is the reason Frankfurter Rundschau, updated May 15, 2019, accessed on December 17, 2019
  30. China blocks Wikipedia in all languages orf.at, May 15, 2019, May 15, 2019.