The Signpost

In the media

Chinese censorship

The classical Chinese words of Wikipedia

Wikimania was heavily covered in the international press this week (see "In brief", below). One major story that came out of the conference was Jimmy Wales’ statements that he would prefer to have Wikipedia banned entirely in mainland China than censored as it is currently.

Wales was interviewed by the The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog (and later covered in the same paper's China Realtime Report blog) during Wikimania. The comments came about during a discussion on access to the secure version of Wikimedia projects—in China, the uncensored, encrypted version of Wikipedia is blocked completely by the Great Firewall, but the unencrypted version is available with keyword filtering.

The Chinese government's censorship and occasional banning of Wikipedia has meant that Wikipedia is not the dominant online encyclopedia on the mainland; rather, competitors like Baidu Baike and Hudong predominate. Though activists have asked Wikipedia to make the encrypted version the default version of the site, to force Beijing's hand, Wales and the Foundation say that this is not currently technically feasible. Also stating that he opposed any efforts by the Chinese government to force editors to register under real names, Wales concluded that "We don’t approve of filtering, but there is nothing we can do to stop it."

The interview was covered in Tech2 (Will not comply with China's censorship diktat, insists Jimmy Wales), BoingBoing (Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia won't surveil users for China), The Diplomat (Wikipedia Refuses to Comply with China's Censorship), Shanghaiist (Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales refuses to comply with Chinese censors), the International Business Times (Wikipedia Assures It Will Not Bow Down to ANY China Censorship Demands), Policymic (Wikipedia's Co-founder is Ready to Call China's Bluff), Firstpost (Would prefer no Wikipedia in China than follow censorship laws: Jimmy Wales), the Washington Post Worldview (Wikipedia largely alone in defying Chinese self censorship demands), and the China Digital Times (Wikipedia Co-Founder Refuses to Comply with Censorship).

In brief


















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-14/In_the_media