There are many reports of Blogger/Blogspot sites being blocked in China again.

I’ve had reports from users with China Netcom DSL in Beijing and China Telecom in Shanghai that it’s blocked.

This story from the Observer has been making the rounds in Chinese Internet circles:

Google is to enter the political arena in earnest this week when it debates freedom of speech, intellectual property rights and how to connect Africa to the internet at a special UN conference. [...]

Google will declare itself unrepentant over the controversial decision to censor its search engine at the behest of Beijing. At the first Internet Governance Forum in Athens, starting tomorrow, the firm will insist its presence in China does more good than harm by getting more information to more people.

Knowing a number of Google folks related to this policy, I think “unrepentant” is too strong a word for their “lesser of two evils” approach. I’ll wait to see the actual reports from the conference.

Google’s motto, ‘Do no evil’, has taken a battering in recent months.

Actually, Google’s informal corporate motto is “Don’t be evil,” and I’m still surprised how many journalists and media outlets consistently get this wrong.

It’s a subtle but important difference. You can partake in unsavory “lesser evil” methods without actually being evil. And ever since “axis of evil” and “evildoers” have been introduced by G.W. Bush, I’m convinced the word “evil” should not be thrown around so casually.

Google is bound to be put under pressure over its foray into China. [Andrew] McLaughlin [head of global public policy at Google] said: ‘Google.cn is censored but we’ve come up with a technique for deciding what is to be censored that is basically technical, not editorial, and very reactive. That leads us to blocking from our site the minimum that the ISP [internet service provider] level requires.

Now, to rebut this slightly – just because a system is “basically technical” and “very reactive” doesn’t mean that the blocking decisions are necessarily less restrictive than ones that might be human-oriented and sluggish. Perhaps it would me more accurate to say Google’s system has “lexical” or “syntactic” precision rather than banning broad “themes” or “subjects,” and that has the potential to prevent overblocking of content though it does not guarantee it.

Let’s also not forget Yahoo! and Microsoft have done far worse things to China users than any other US dotcoms to date. So while we debate whether Google meets its own Code of Conduct, we should also question why others don’t have one.

From MacNN:

The Kewei Digital Jianwai SOHO Apple Store is set to open on October 31st in Beijing, making it Beijing’s largest Apple-related store to date.

While this won’t be a true Apple Store with a Genius Bar, it’s a welcome addition.

The latest “Top Global Web Properties” report from comScore (September 2006) places Wikipedia-related projects right at the top of an impressive list of web sites.

It is clearly the #1 nonprofit and #1 reference site in the world by traffic. Though these stats (and Alexa, Nielsen, Hitwise) should be taken very skeptically, this certainly is consistent with previous rankings and practical experience.

Some observations -

• YouTube.com was bought for US $1.6 billion (stock swap) and has roughly half the traffic of Wikipedia.
• Mozilla Firefox is making in the “order of magnitude” of US $72 million from the Google search box in the web browser and corresponding Google Ads.

If Wikipedia started to take in a revenue stream from a Google search box or Amazon referral fees, given its traffic, it would certainly rake in tens of millions if not more. But advertising and revenue deals have caused community splits within Wikipedia in the past, so it’s not likely to be tried again soon.

Wikimedia Foundation’s budget is currently very modest – five fulltime employees, and two halftime. Bandwidth and hosting costs are relatively low at under six figures a month. The Foundation depends on individual donations from users, but could do so much more with its brand for other funding sources.

How does Wikipedia monetize its content and brand without crossing its community?

That’s the billion dollar question, literally.

Complete data can be found at comScore.

Last week, Wikipedia user Tawker and I launched the new “Wikipedia Weekly” audio podcast, which is in a radio show format to cover issues related to the online community and encyclopedia. It’s a great example of international collaboration, socially and technically. Tawker was in Vancouver, Canada and I was in Beijing, China, and we used Skype to record near studio-quality audio across the Pacific.
Some of the topics include:

• New category browsing system
• China unblocks Wikipedia
• Top visited articles for the week (The World According to Wikipedia)

Give it a listen. You can download individual versions, or subscribe to the podcast in Apple’s iTunes to get it delivered every week automatically.

On October 10, 2006, Wikipedia access started opening up in China, having been blocked almost one year. The English language version (en.wp) is widely accessible while the Chinese version (zh.wp) still has spotty access. I’ve written before about how some news reports have not reported this well.

Monday’s New York Times has a story which mentions this blog’s reports on reachability from the PRC that I reported to CNET. (”Chinese Government Relaxes Its Total Ban on Wikipedia,” Noam Cohen, October 16, 2006)

Here’s an update – bloggers and Wikipedians across the PRC have helped me assemble this chart of Wikipedia reachability. As of October 19, 2006, 3pm China local time, this is the rough state of affairs:

China Telecom is the main landline operator, and provider of DSL service. The Chinese Wikipedia is accessible for a great many folks for Telecom, but still blocked for some. China Netcom (DSL provider for many homes) still consistently blocks all access to zh.wp. For the full version which shows results for academic networks, see this chart.

This shows what many Great Firewall observers know already – blocking is not uniform across the country, and depends on specific municipality and ISP.

Nevertheless, this is encouraging and will certainly allow many more contributions to Wikipedia from China users.

CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast recently talked about the Wikipedia block being lifted in China. I noted a few inaccuracies in their report and sent an audio comment, of which they used the first minute or so. I’ve put in my entire audio segement here with observations about the Great Firewall.

• Buzz Out Loud for 2006-10-12 – MP3 (top of the program, “Wikipedia unblocked in China”)
• Buzz Out Loud for 2006-10-13 – MP3 (my audio comment, 18:45 into the program)
• My unedited full comment – MP3 (3 minutes)

Text version of my comments below:

Hi Buzz Out Loud,

I’m glad to see you led off the show with news about Wikipedia being more accessible in China. Users here in the PRC are pretty excited about the lifting of the block.

Unlike other news outlets, you correctly noted the English version is now accessible, while the Chinese version is still blocked in many places. I was one of the folks who posted to Slashdot about not getting too excited yet, because it’s still only a PARTIAL lifting.

It’s also interesting to note the lifting of this block comes almost one year to the day it was blocked, on October 19, 2005.

However, I’d like to point out an error in your report. Now it’s understandable because it was badly reported first in The Guardian newspaper in September and then further misreported in BoingBoing before it got corrected.

You mentioned, “China had asked Wikipedia to censor itself to appease totalitarian Beijing.”

Now this never happened. The Chinese authorities never requested anything from the Wikimedia Foundation or anyone connected with Wikipedia. I work quite closely with the Wikipedia community in China so I would have known, and I also confirmed this with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.

In fact, it is standard for the PRC to never to discuss why anything is blocked or under what conditions a block might be lifted. So hopefully people will understand this was not a negotiation – users in China have been patiently waiting for this day for nearly a year. And it’s finally come.

Another thing you mentioned was that “Tiananmen has been the focal point” for blocking content. While Tiananmen content will likely get blocked, it is only one of many subjects that might get blocked. Some other standard subjects are Tibet, Taiwan independence or the falun gong spiritual movement. Other terms like swear words or pornographic content are blocked too. In fact there are probably many social conservatives in the US that wouldn’t mind blocking the same sites.

But you’d also be surprised what does NOT get filtered.

Tom mentioned content about the Great Leap Forward would probably be blocked. In fact, the English Wikipedia page for Great Leap Forward worked fine for me. And if you click down the list of China History articles in Wikipedia the following worked just fine: Hundred Flowers Campaign, Cultural Revolution, Chinese Civil War, Gang of Four, Chinese economic reform, and even the original Tiananmen Incident of 1976.

However, once you click on the article for Tiananmen protests of 1989 you get blocked. So actually, I’m pretty impressed it let through the Tiananmen Incident of 1976, but blocked the more controversial Tiananmen protests of 1989.

So here’s something that’s a bit counterintuitive – the filtering in China’s Great Firewall is getting more technically sophisticated, with observers seeing it as becoming more ominous.

But in fact, it’s very likely more sites can be unblocked and available to China’s Internet users, because the page-by-page filtering can catch the “problem” articles, while letting the rest through. This “high tech filtering” might just be the reason why Wikipedia can be unblocked today so that 99% of the 1.4 million articles can now be accessed. That’s a mixed blessing I suppose.

I’m a big fan of the podcast, and I’m looking into creating a podcast for the Wikipedia community in the same style as Buzz Out Loud. I’ll let you know when that happens. Keep up the good work.

The good news: The Wikipedia block in China is partially lifted

The bad news: The Chinese version is still not generally accessible, and the Western media reporting has been poor

Editor & Publisher magazine put out an article October 11 saying:

Well not quite correct. Reports started coming in on October 10 from different parts of the PRC, saying that the English Wikipedia was now accessible. A friend using an open Wifi in Beijing emailed me saying he could suddenly start using Wikipedia again. Some folks in Hubei said it was still blocked. Shanghai and Guangdong users said parts were accessible.

From a Beijing China Netcom’s residential DSL connection, the English language and other foreign language versions are now accessible, but the Chinese version is still blocked (zh.wikipedia.org).

It’s important to know there is no monolithically operating Great Firewall of China, even though it is a cute and useful moniker.

The “GFW system” depends on a distributed system of checks and filters that depends on the particular ISP, the type of connection being used, and the geographic locale. A commercial connection in Hubei is different than a residential DSL in Guangdong is different than an academic network in Shantou. Something blocked in one area of the country may be totally fine in another. A keyword that is filtered in one place could be allowed in another.

So for folks in China’s tech circles, it’s pretty frustrating seeing blanket “China blocks” or “China unblocks” declaration without specifics or accurate reports.

Filtering also happens on different levels between the domestic network and the greater Internet, so even though Wikipedia is generally accessible in English, it’s still subject to:

• URL-level filtering – host header or keyword in URL rejected
• Text-stream level filtering – offending keyword in Web page

More info as it arrives, but let’s not forget that for now the most important part of Wikipedia for PRC users – the Chinese version – is still not generally accessible.

UPDATE: After posting this entry, several folks contacted me with some results:

• China Telecom DSL, Shanghai – en:OK, zh:OK
• CETC-CHINACOMM COMMUNICATIONS Co.,Ltd., Beijing- en:OK, zh:OK
• Various ISPs, Anhui – en:OK, zh:BLOCKED