Editor and Publisher, and the Wikipedia site itself, report that the English version of Wikipedia is now accessible in China after being blocked for over a year. CDT has also gotten reports from Internet users in Beijing that the site is now accessible. From E&P:
The online interactive reference site Wikipedia announced Tuesday that the site had apparently been made accessible in China, after being blocked for just over a year by the country’s government.
Wikipedia reported on its site that it had received word from multiple users in the country on Chinese-forums.com that the site had been restored. The most recent blocking was the third such outage reported by Wikipedia. [Full text]
CDT’s Jonathan Ansfield writes from Beijing about his Wikipedia search earlier today:
Straight searches for a few of the commonly troublesome terms (“Tiananmen“, “Tibet“, “Falun Gong” “Hu Jintao” ) still hit the wall, usually requiring you to restart your browser and relog onto Wikipedia to search further. But “Zhao Ziyang“, “Democracy“, “Taiwan” and “Xinjiang” all come up without any problem. “Hu Jintao” is fidgety – wouldn’t you know it – but can be found circuitously through searches for other leaders.
Really quite amazing what a politically clueless teenager can learn much more easily all of a sudden. Searching “Wen Jiabao,” I found him pictured at the Square with Zhao Ziyang in ’89. Huang Ju, reports Wikipedia, is suffering from pancreatic cancer and “in politicial trouble, especially after the dismissal of his Shanghai Clique Colleague Chen Liangyu” (who’s also searchable). Then Wikipedia’s got this guy Gao Zhisheng, who at last report, “On August 15, 2006, after numerous death threats and endless harassment, while visiting his sister’s family Mr. Gao was abducted by the Chinese secret police without any legal proceeding. So far, no one in public knows his whereabouts.”
And of the Great Helmsman Mao Zedong, Wikipedia cautions us: “Many of his detractors however accuse him of having been a mass-murderer, holding his leadership accountable for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese.”
