It seems my work on Chinese Wikipedia after being unblocked have inspired more benchmarking at talk.blogbus.com.
Some of their findings after the block was lifted:
This is to be expected with such a big influx of newbies, but it’s interesting to see exactly how much.
With my recent reporting on the Wikipedia block being lifted, many people have asked me, “Why do you think Wikipedia was finally unblocked in China?”
I believe it was because of the argument Jimmy Wales and fellow Chinese Wikipedians have consistently put forth — Wikipedia has a neutral point of view at its core, with no activist or subversive agenda to the site. In the end, I believe consensus among the authorities determined the benefits of Wikipedia far outweigh the risks, and signals their understanding of the beneficial nature of the emerging read-write Web. Read on for an explanation.
It took some time for government censors to get used to the wiki concept. The nature of China’s authorities is to fear what they don’t understand. But this is not unique to China. You don’t have to be a skeptical, authoritarian government to doubt the legitimacy and neutrality of Wikipedia. Commentators Robert McHenry and Nicholas Carr have been prominent skeptics. For rich irony, see Jaron Lanier’s gripe about Wikipedia called “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.” (That title alone should buy some credibility with China’s leaders). So after a year of watching Wikipedia rise in popularity, Chinese authorities understand the wiki phenemenon more and realize sitting on the sidelines is disadvantageous in two ways.
Dual Harm
The complete argument goes like this: With Wikipedia blocked, China suffers because its ranks of knowledge workers cannot access the top reference site in the world, and the world suffers from not having China’s expertise and input in Wikipedia. Sound familiar? This is a direct example of Wikipedia as the ultimate implementation of what Lawrence Lessig calls “read-write” culture.
China wants to read it, the world wants China to write to it.
Opening access to Wikipedia would be win-win, and the folks who unblocked Wikipedia likely realized this.
Lessons
More importantly though, this provides insight on how to effect change in the PRC, something I’ve been emphasizing for years - encourage China to approach the table, to join the benefits on their own motivation, and allowing them to “tap in.” Unfortunately, this has often not been the approach of Western governments or NGOs.
What doesn’t work? Pushing China solely on issues of freedom of speech, civil liberties for the sake of human rights. It’s just too easy to dismiss these as meddling, imperialistic Western viewpoints used as wedge issues. Do not forget, China was the victim of imperialistic designs which still have a deep effect on the psyche of Chinese leaders and issues of trust.
What does work? Asking China to join the community, because China’s knowledge workers are missing out on the best resource in the world and a resource that US and Indian engineers, scientists, academics and citizens are already using to increase their economic competitiveness. That’s the economic argument.
Also, Wikipedia benefits from having more PRC knowhow to improve its content in arts, history, culture and regional knowledge. China considers itself the vanguard of Chinese culture. Whether this is true or not, a Wikipedia with very few PRC contributions is certainly a concern for them. This is likely to have influenced the decision to allow their own citizens to influence the site, to balance out the majority comprised of Hong Kong and Taiwan contributors. That’s the cultural argument.
Blocking Bad, Filtering Less-bad
If we assume the authorities believe in allowing Wikipedia’s read-write culture into the PRC, but still fear subversive and “unharmonious” content, there is a compelling technical argument for unblocking — you don’t need a block on Wikipedia’s entire site by IP address, when the Great Firewall has finer grained URL- and Web page-level blocking that would suffice. While blocking at this level is not something Wikipedians would be happy to see, it’s certainly better than a wholesale block.
(This leads to a paradox — better technology in China’s Internet filtering methods could actually result in more sites being accessible.)
No one ever knows exactly why a block is put in place in China, or why its lifted. But in this case, it looks like the traffic is flowing, and users are signing up in the thousands. There will be more interesting stories of the “write” part of this story, as more PRC users become members of the editing community. Already, administrators in ZH are reverting a new wave of copyright violations, mainly from newbies who don’t quite understand Wikipedias free content license yet. But this is to be expected, and it is something they will learn quickly. Their influence in the community will be fascinating to watch.
And in the end, if you think about it, doesn’t it make complete sense that the People’s Republic of China would embrace the people’s encyclopedia of Wikipedia?
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 accessible from everywhere in the country - 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:
Where ZH was previously getting 300-400 new registrants a day, the weekend after unblocking has seen over one thousand new registrants a day. November 12 (interestingly, a Sunday) saw over 1,200 new registrants.
As a result - though ZH is only the 12th largest language Wikipedia, in terms of “new users registered each day” it has suddenly vaulted from the middle of the pack to be the 2nd largest growing Wikipedia by users, now far outpacing the German, French and Spanish Wikipedia juggernauts. (English Wikipedia is in a different universe at number one)
That same Sunday, there were 75% more new articles added to ZH than the previous week (Nov 12 v Nov 5).
This sharp growth is certainly exciting, but it will truly test this community to absorb this volume of newbies so quickly. Get those neutral point of view and wiki markup tutorials in place.Before the lifting of the block, a quarter of the active contributors were from Hong Kong, another quarter from Taiwan. The rest were a mix from Singapore, Malaysia, US, Canada, PRC and other places. That’s going to shift in a major way, starting this week.
Also, this weekend ZH surpassed 100,000 articles. At this rate of new user signup and article creation, the next 100,000 will come very quickly.
The ZH community has been waiting over a year for this moment, and how prescient it was that just last night Tom Friedman was in Beijing extolling the virtues of Wikipedia at the Bookworm Cafe, saying that the world has been flattened by this new “upload” culture.
Welcome PRC users, to a global online community the likes of which you have never seen before.
Congratulations: the Chinese Wikipedia celebrated its 100,000th article this weekend. It comes on the heels of what appears to be a permanent lifting of the block on Wikipedia in the People’s Republic of China. Stay tuned for more interesting stats on the resulting impact.
How good is the international Skype conferencing on a Beijing DSL connection? After five weeks of doing Skype: pretty good, I have to conclude.
When we do the WikipediaWeekly podcast with others from around the world, we use Skype to conference call four to five people at a time. The group conversation is recorded, and one person (David Still, in Australia) usually edits it down to size. During recording, if network conditions are good, it sounds excellent - nearly as good as the ISDN lines radio stations use for studio quality.
This week I hosted the conference from a humble one megabit DSL connection in Beijing, connecting two folks from Australia, and one person from the continental United States. Later in the show, we had one fellow from Hawaii. It worked out great.
(When doing a multiway conference, Skype might choose another host for the conference among the participants, which seems to be the one with UDP port forwarding working. To our knowledge, I was the only one with it configured this way.)
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)
Users of different ISP have just confirmed accessibility, including:
This is a pretty significant development, especially with Chinese Wikipedia on the cusp of reaching 100,000 articles. Let’s see if the access holds.
I cannot say I’m surprised by this. In fact, it’s probably happened many times before. From VNUnet:
Hackers use Wikipedia to spread malware
Beware geeks bearing gifts
Hackers are using online encyclopaedia Wikipedia to spread malware, according to a security firm.
Sophos discovered that hackers had created an article on the German edition of Wikipedia containing false information about a new version of the Blaster worm, along with a link to a fix.
However, the fix is actually a piece of malicious code designed to infect visitors’ PCs.
[…]
“The good news is that the authorities at Wikipedia quickly identified and edited the article on their site,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.
“Unfortunately, a version of the page remained in the archive, allowing the hackers to send spam and continue to direct visitors to the malicious code.”
Wikipedia has now confirmed that it has permanently erased all versions of the page.
This is one problem of the “infinite undo” of the edit history, but Wikipedia does have ways to erase it from the database in cases like this, and serious copyright violations.
