Chart: Wikipedia access in China
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.
October 16th, 2006 01:42
I don’t understand about the roadblocks in the internet in some of China, but doesn’t every country have the right to block what they want to the outer world?
October 16th, 2006 01:48
just as much as others have the right to point it out and think about ways to change it…
:)
October 16th, 2006 02:12
Marta, one could say that a government with sovereignty over its borders (virtual or physical) has a responsibility to secure them to the benefit of its citizens. It just so happens that different cultures will have different interpretations of what this means. In the US, “freedom of speech” is cherised more than “national security.” Well at least until recently.
For China, that calculus is different. A few hundred years of external “incursions” of imperialism and war into China’s borders - British, French, German, Italian, American, Japanese, et al. - has had a significant impact on the psyche of China’s leadership and the resulting policies. It doesn’t justify such policies, but it certainly helps to explain them as not being so irrational.
October 16th, 2006 05:51
Hi,
I’m studying at Shandong Uni in Jinan right now. Just wanted to help fill in the gaps on your chart. The university allows access to en.wp, but not to zh.wp. If you go to zh.wp, you get your wrist slapped and all wikipedia connections get blocked for 5 minutes. Also, some articles like like Tienamen Sq Massacare and F@lun G0ng. are still censored on en.wp.
October 16th, 2006 08:46
China: Censors open some access to Wikipedia (Access chart)…
After having blocked access to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia for almost a year completely, China has now started to open up some parts of it.
With the help of bloggers and Wikipedians across China Andrew Lih has created a chart of Wikipedia reacha…
October 16th, 2006 10:34
Wikipedia: Partial Availability in China…
As of today the Chinese Version of the Wikipedia is becoming more accessible, but is still not widely available (see my previous post). This information comes from Andrew Lih, a blogger, academic and wikipedian. He has coordinated with other Chinese……
October 16th, 2006 20:01
[…] It seems the Chinese version of Wikipedia is slowly getting unblocked.It seems the Chinese version of Wikipedia is slowly getting unblocked. Andrew Lih” is keeping track of the areas in China where it has become available and the ones that still have no access. […]
October 16th, 2006 20:15
Great work. I hope you’ll keep track of this for a long period to see more patterns.
One small correction. You mention “As of October 19..” unless you know more of course:)
October 16th, 2006 21:58
It is good that China is removing the barriers.
For example, I have tried very hard in the past to enter an entry in the PRC to declare it as the world’s largest democracy.
However, someone from scotland kept removing my entry on that.
But if more Chinese can have access to wikipedia, then we can teach the rest of the world what is democracy.
We know a true Communist country must first be a democracy as Adolf Hitler had studied:
“The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight.
http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch02.html
October 16th, 2006 23:09
[…] CHINA - Chart: Wikipedia access in China “On October 10, 2006, Wikipedia access started opening up in China, having been blocked almost one year. The Englis language version (en.wp) is widely accessible while the Chinese version (zh.wp) still has spotty access” […]
October 17th, 2006 04:44
Hi,
In Yunnan you can reach the english page, but the chinese is still inaccessible.
October 17th, 2006 07:42
[…] The China Digital Times includes an interesting post giving details about some of the names and terms that can (not) be searched and Andrew Lih has assembled a chart of Wikipedia reachability with the help of bloggers and Wikipedians inside the PRC. As Lih writes, “[the chart] shows what many Great Firewall observers know already - blocking is not uniform across the country.” Blocked for roughly a year, the unblocking remains something of a mystery: “We don’t know what prompted the block and don’t know what prompted the unblock, ” Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, told the New York Times. In an earlier post on the China Digital Times, Wales vowed he would not go down the same path as search engine Google by bowing to pressure from Beijing to censor sensitive articles. Censor or be censored? How this unravels will be interesting. […]
October 17th, 2006 12:00
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061017.gtwik1017/BNStory/PersonalTech/home
Globe and Mail just quoted your blog…
Nick/Zanimum
October 17th, 2006 22:05
@mahathir_fan: That is a joke, right? (I’m sure it must be one, but some people might misinterpret it.)
October 18th, 2006 04:33
Many have criticised Wikipedia as sadly deficient. Which it is. Until you have to live without it. Then you realise what a treasure trove of information it is (even if there are other places to access Wikipedia information, like Answers.com). Anyway, I’m absolutely relieved to see Wikipedia accessible again.
Of course, Wikipedia does have its drawbacks, including the presence of crackpots like Mahathir-fan who are out to distort the truth for their own particular motives, fathomable or otherwise.
October 18th, 2006 04:36
go for TOR http://tor.eff.org/ and you can view it all.
there’s TorPark as an easy stand-allone solution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpark
then you’d have no more issues with blocked sites
October 19th, 2006 02:29
[…] See related information on NY Times, Digg.com, Wikipedia, and some chart. « « Previous: Kitchen […]
October 20th, 2006 00:32
[…] [unblock Wikipedia] - Since rencently internet users of mainland China have again access to the English language after one year of blocking. The Chinese language version of Wikipedia is still blocked for many Chinese users. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-16/… http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/2006/10/16/chart-wikipedia-access-in-ch… […]
October 20th, 2006 20:58
The chart is excellent, Andrew, though some key provinces/cities (such as Chongqing) are missing. Why don’t you go one step further and host the spreadsheet on a web spreadsheet such as EditGrid? This way you can post a live-updated version of the data on this blog. You may even share its write permission to public for wikipedians from the missing regions to report status (the true Wikipedia approach!).
October 21st, 2006 21:02
good job, Andrew, in fact, a small advice: you could differentiate China Telecom and Netcom by geography la. China Telecom is in charge of the internet access in South China, while China Netcom is responsible for the North China. I believe that China Mobile and Unicom are also depending on the server of both China Telecom and Netcome to access to the outside Internet website.
October 25th, 2006 21:12
[…] UPDATE: Via ChinaHerald, and interesting post by Andrew Lih on how the unblocking actually happens…shows that the Great Firewall while mandated top down, is implemented bottom up, actually very distributed and very provincial…similar to most things in China. […]
November 10th, 2006 18:23
[…] According to many folks around China, the Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) seems to be widely accessible in the last 24 hours. Previously, the English language and other Wikipedias were unblocked with still roughly 50% of folks not being able to access zh.wikipedia.org. (See chart) […]
November 13th, 2006 03:59
[…] Here in the PRC, it has been four days since the block of Chinese Wikipedia (ZH) was fully lifted. All reports indicate it is indeed now accessible from everywhere in country. This is an improvement on the initial partial lifting of the block on 10/10. So I wondered - was there any way to check the effects of the block being lifted? A trip to the Wikipedia logs of new user registrations and new articles this morning shows a dramatic story. In short: […]
January 4th, 2007 00:29
“But on sensitive questions of China’s modern history or on hot-button issues, the Chinese version diverges so dramatically from its English counterpart that it sometimes reads as if it were approved by the censors themselves.” from [http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/29/news/wiki.php Chinese-language Wikipedia presents different view of history]
—
I know, right now, those chinese spy moderators must be really hoping that they can delete this topic asap. I posted a similar comment on the chinese page, it was IMMEDIATLY deleted. and all my other comments which are not related to this topic, which are very relevant to those topics were also deleted, and somehow those chinese spy moderators also made them “disappeared” as if they did not delete anything at all. and then they banned me for “vandalism.”
It is a known fact that China blocked its people’s access to wikipedia. however, i checked the chinese page, they have total of 29 moderators that are in China! 6 from beijing, 6 from guangzhou, 6 from shanghai, etc. There are more moderators from China than from any other parts of the world. however, if the chinese are blocked from getting on here, how can those Chinese moderators still have time and resources to moderate the chinese wikipedia? isn’t that odd?
you may have heard about [[Shi Tao]], the chinese government put him in jail for 10 years because the government was able to find his location thru a single IP address which was reported by yahoo. those 29 moderators’ are listed publicly on the chinese page. So it is quite obvious that the chinese government must have those 29 mainland chinese moderators’ personal informaiton. I highly suspect that most of the chinese mainland moderators are spies sent by the Chinese communists. It is a banned web site, what kind of people are willing to edit a web site that is banned by his or her own government especially in china?!
I can probably safely say that there are more people using the chinese version from Hong Kong and Taiwan than people from [[mainland China]]. however, [[Hongkong]] only has 13, [[Taiwan]] has 17. isn’t that odd? further, during my time on that site, as far as I know, no moderator from hong kong banned or deleted my contributions, and there are 13 of them. if I really did something wrong, shouldn’t they also be able to ban or delete? and who can gurantee that those moderators who are listed under other country names are not really from mainland china?
Another thing, it is forbidden to gather without government permit in China. however, that chinese site recently even had two meetings in capital - [[Beijing]] and in city of guangzhou. there are constant reports about police harassing and spying on people who secretly gathered in churches which are not approved by the government, etc. so there is no way that the government doesn’t spy on those wikipedia meetings. It is just shocking to see those moderators so “bravely” advertising on the public page. and when I posted a question about my doubt, it was immediatly deleted as usual. those comment pages were also put into protection.
i am not insance or crazy. It is also a known fact that china has spies in taiwan. it seems to me that the moderator from taiwan jasonzhoucn is also very “communistly” suspicious. one time, i added to only two extra links to an article of the chinese golden shield project, he immediatly deleted them without a reason. he also deleted the extra information that i have added for some of the articles.
i am not crazy, or delusional. however, think about it, the chinese have to use special programs, proxy servers in order to get on this page. and even if they have high speed, the speed won’t be fast enough. who would have the patience even to edit those pages if the internet connection is not fast enough? there are 13 billion chinese, how many of them can actually get on here easily? so how is that possible that there are so many mainland chinese moderators?! and since the majority of Chinese can’t get on this site, you would expect that there are lots of articles pro taiwan’s independence, but there are not a lot. And the article about “Two Chinas” was actually deleted TWICE in just November. And one of the moderator later on said that he did not find any history about its delettion at all?!
The reason that i am suspecting is because of what happened to me recently. i tried to edit the page for the “peopel’s republic of china”. even today, that article does not have a single word about human rights and falun gong. i added those two items, immediatly a mainland chinese moderator deleted my contribution, then put that article into protection. i have added many similar contents in other articles. most of them have been deleted by those mainland chinese moderators.
when i tried to voice my suspision and my comments on those community forums, those moderators immediatly deleted them. then they banned me , accused me doing “vandalism?!”
with 29 chinese mainlander moderators, that site is basically controlled by the chinese spies sent by the communist party. they do not allow people to add anything that are bad about the chinese communist party. so here i am, I don’t know if this is the proper place to voice my opinion. i seriously think that someone should take a look into this matter.
“But on sensitive questions of China’s modern history or on hot-button issues, the Chinese version diverges so dramatically from its English counterpart that it sometimes reads as if it were approved by the censors themselves.” [1] This indeed confirmed my suspicion.
January 4th, 2007 19:16
For the record, I’ve met many of the admins of ZH.wikipedia.org from HK, PRC and Taiwan, and they are more similar than dissimilar. Most of the prominent PRC-based admins are in sync with the values of NPOV in the greater Wikipedia community, so I would tend to doubt that Wikipedia has any serious overrunning by propagandists. But as Wikipedians have expressed before — the community welcomes folks who are obviously of one viewpoint, if they can write neutrally.
July 12th, 2007 09:59
I have visited your site 782-times
July 12th, 2007 10:00
I could not find this site in the Search Engines index
December 3rd, 2007 22:21
[…] The CCP gives out the order and internet services providers implements with different provinces and cities at various levels. A former-professor as well as a wikipedian, Andrew Lih, has provided a clear chart to show the access at different locations during the 2006 blocked-unblocked-blocked period. Lih also provided statistics and graphs charting the number of new users, suggesting that the blocking had restrained and damaged the development of Chinese Wikipedia. […]