The lesser known Wikimedia Commons, cousin of Wikipedia, reached a milestone — one million media files today. These are mostly “free” pictures, illustrations and diagrams, though there are also audio and video files as well. By free, Wikimedia Commons generally means ones under public domain, Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike and GNU Free Documentation Licenses.

Daveydweeb reports that after it started in September 2004, Commons’ millionth file was of the Singapore Zoo.

As you can see there’s great variety in the photos:.

Sometimes it’s just interesting to click on a random photo from the Commons.

NY Times correspondent Howard French plunges into Wikipedia and takes a comparative look at entries in English and Chinese. He didn’t waste any time going straight to the article on the big man himself - Mao. He concludes the versions take very different views:

Indeed, in its present form, the Chinese Wikipedia introduction to Mao Zedong could hardly be more anodyne: “One of the main founders and leaders of the Communist Party of China, the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Republic of China,” it reads. “He introduced a series of political movements such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He had a great influence over 20th-century China and the world.”

On the evidence of entries like this, for the moment, the fight over editorial direction of Wikipedia in Chinese is being won by enthusiasts who practice self-censorship.

I don’t doubt it’s hard for PRC folks to write critically of Mao. It’s too out of bounds, too much against their conditioning, even under a cloak of anonymous editing.

What about Chinese Wikipedia editors outside the PRC? Do they provide a counter-balance? Even armed with the full range of facts, you have to be pretty brave or determined to face the contentuous edit wars that would ensue. Even then, it’s often hard to get Taiwan and Hong Kong Wikipedians interested in the particulars of PRC history.

Which brings me to a question I ask all the time - with Chinese culture holding up first and foremost the values of “harmony” and “prosperity,” where does that leave the pursuit of the truth? I don’t ask this question rhetorically - when teaching and lecturing about the media around Hong Kong and China, I often wondered about this because that is the essence of journalism - the pursuit of the truth. What motivated Chinese students to study journalism? Why would Chinese journalists want to practice their craft better? What Chinese traditions fuel the motivation for better journalism, and for open and honest reflection on history?

As a product of a Western Judeo-Christian environment, I come from a very different angle than the Chinese in the region. My belief in a vigorous and free press is a belief that it is a necessary condition for a functioning transparent liberal democracy. One may wish this was a universal endeavour, but it is not. It depends greatly on prevailing societal values.

As for understanding these Chinese values, Taoism and Confucianism provide a starting point, but neither are actively interpreted or dogmatically adhered to in contemporary culture. They provide a backdrop for the modern Chinese social and work ethic, but they are not adequate in themselves to predict the emergence of a bold quest for the truth. Buddhism is centered around the individual, rather than the functions of society, and is not very instructive in this area either.

So I do ponder this question. A lot.

What it means for a Chinese Wikipedia, and what it means for China.

From Tuesday’s South China Morning Post, story by Emerald Dong:

The survey, organised by the China Youth Daily and Tencent, China’s largest instant messaging service provider, found that about 95 per cent of the 6,600 respondents rated the nation’s environmental degradation as severe and 70 per cent felt local government paid little regard to green priorities.

Water pollution topped the list of respondents’ concerns, with 87.1 per cent of people worried about its effects, followed by air pollution, domestic and industrial waste, food contamination, desertification and noise pollution.

The poll was conducted in response to the China Meteorological Administration’s (CMA) announcement earlier this month that Beijing had been classified for the first time as an “acid-rain city” and 80 per cent of the city’s rainfall in August was acid rain.

The only saving grace I suppose is that Beijing get so little rain anually.

technorati tags:china, pollution, environment, poll

Anyone who remembers the Encyclopedia Brown series of mystery books will find this take amusing.

Chinese Wikipedia was widely blocked again in China on Friday, November 17, somewhere between 9am and 10am China Standard Time.

New registrations took a dive after that point, but, curiously, they are still much higher than before October 10 when a full block was in place.

Here are some averages:

• Before Oct 10: 400 new users/day
• Before Nov 9: 600 new users/day
• Before Nov 17: 1300+ new users/day

But the registration numbers since the “reblocking” are still very high, despite the widespread reports Wikipedia is largely inaccessible in PRC. I have not heard of anyone from any municipality or ISP being able to get through to zh.wp successfully. But look at some numbers for the days ending:

• Nov 18, 0000 UTC: 764
• Nov 19, 0000 UTC: 589
• Nov 20, 0000 UTC: 811
• Nov 21, 0000 UTC: 826

So this is quite curious - the new user numbers have not dropped all the way back to pre-October 10 days of a full block. In fact, these numbers are still much higher than after the first unblock. Without more information about new registered users’ source IP address, we can only speculate.

It’s possible the news coverage of the unblock/reblock has led folks to visit Chinese Wikipedia from other locations outside the PRC and register. I don’t think that alone explains the large numbers. It is possible there are still folks in the PRC that can access Chinese Wikipedia and are still registering.

After Wikipedia received press attention this week, and the Chinese term for Wikipedia (維基百科) showed up in the government Foreign Ministry transcripts, someone asked me an interesting question:

How many people in China know what the Chinese word for “wiki” or “Wikipedia”? One out of ten, 1/100, 1/1000 or even less?

Given that only about 1/10 of China is on the Internet, and given about 1/10 of those are familiar with Wikipedia or Baidupedia, I’d put it at 1/100 at the absolute maximum.

For the US, I’d say that number is closer to 1/10 if not 1/5 of folks have heard of Wikipedia before. It’s gotten that popular recently.

I’d be interested to hear peoples’ guesses on these numbers.

An update late Saturday, early Sunday: Wikipedia is still inaccessible for most everyone in PRC. The current block is actually a bit more restrictive than before October 10, since any mention of the string “zh.wikipedia.org” in any URL seems to be blocked.

For example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=zh.wikiepdia.org

will not go through, and will get you a “Connection reset” error.

I’ll try to post some more statistics later.

Wikipedia was blocked again in China this morning between 9am and 10am local time. A new user registration chart, plotted by hour, shows exactly when the block occurred (ie. the red dot). The open nature of Wikipedia and its public log files made this quite easy to determine.

The chart shows UTC time (ie. time in London) making the black vertical lines correspond to 8am (UTC+8) in Beijing and all of China.

Some observations:

• On a typical day, traffic starts to climb at 9am when people start work/study and traffic starts falling just after midnight.
• Just before the re-block, there were a record 1823 new user registrations in a 24 hour period. That’s more than one new person per minute on average. This is a significant jump from the 1200-1300 per day on Tuesday and Wednesday.
• Even with the block reinstituted, there may still be some PRC folks who can get through. There are about 40 new user registrations per hour right now, whereas a sampling of October 6, when completely blocked in the PRC, showed 20 new users per hour. It is hard to tell without additional stats.

To the media, and folks who have been checking this site for stories, please do wait another day before drawing too many conclusions. The Great Firewall is a distributed system, and not a monolithic one. It will take some time to figure out the state of affiars, and it is not unusual for access to be in flux over a number of days.

Theories Abound

Meanwhile, there has been casual speculation why a block might have been reinstituted.

One story being passed around — yesterday a reporter asked about the unblocking at the regular Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference in Beijing. The response from the PRC spokeswoman was, “I do not know the details of the web site you mentioned,” and a standard rundown of China’s Internet statistics. It’s one of the rare times you’ll see Wikipedia mentioned in an official Chinese government transcript:

Q: 此外，去年10月以来一直被封杀的维基百科中文网站上周得以解禁，你对此有何评论？
Q: The Chinese website of Wikipedia, which had been blocked since last October, was unblocked last week, do you have any comments?

A: 我不清楚你提到的具体网站情况。中国政府积极支持和促进互联网的发展。截止2005年，中国上网用户已超过1.23亿人，中国网站数量达78.8万个。中国已成为世界第二大互联网国家。我们依法对互联网进行管理，这也是世界各国通行的做法。
A: I do not know the details about the website you mentioned. The Chinese [PRC] government actively supports and promotes the development of Internet. By 2005, there have been over 123 million Internet users and 788,000 websites in China. China has become the second largest country for Internet in the world. We oversee the Internet according to laws, this is also what every country in the world does commonly.

That’s the official line. Some Wikipedians have suggested that asking in a high profile press conference might have gotten the site re-examined by higher level folks, and thereby reblocked. Perhaps it was a lower level person who initiated the unblocking, and a higher level person wanted it blocked. This is all speculation. There is no way to know at this point.

There are widespread reports of Wikipedia being inaccessible again in China, and tests this morning indicate it is true. Some time between 7am and 10am this morning in Beijing, I lost access, and users of the following services have confirmed this too:

• Beijing - China Netcom, China Unicom, and academic network
• Shanghai - China Telecom
• Anhui - China Telecom

But a strong caveat - this could be a temporary outage, so don’t draw too many conclusions yet. Folks behind the Great Firewall are used to waiting for the situation to settle.

Ironically enough, this comes right when Chinese Wikipedia hit a record, with over 1800 new user registrations for the 24 hours ending at midnight Nov 17 UTC.

Check back for updates.

Take Wikipedia content. Add a brilliant cartoonist. Shake. You get WikiWorld.

Greg Williams is a veteran illustrator and designer from The Tampa Tribune newspaper in Florida. As a fan of Wikipedia, he started drawing cartoons based on the articles in his spare time for fun.

Now he’s put them four of them up for public consumption on Wikimedia Commons, the Wikipedia sister project for free media content. They’re fabulous.