Chinese block Wikipedia again after just one week?!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 18 November 2006 06:07

Your IT - Entertainment

Looks like the global joy over China’s easing of restrictions to the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, could come to a stop as reports indicate Chinese Internet users are blocked once more.

Perhaps it was just a mistaken action on the part of a government official in China’s ‘Great Firewall’ department, accidentally clicking a button they shouldn’t have clicked that allowed Wikipedia to be seen again by China’s 120 million Internet users.

Perhaps the Chinese Government was stung by reports of well over 1000 registrations a day to the Wikipedia site, wondering why Chinese users didn’t sign up to Government sites with such enthusiasm.

Or perhaps it’s the Chinese Government teaching its citizens a lesson... we they can giveth, they can also taketh away, quicker than a broadband user can download a megabyte of data. If many in China have access to broadband, beyond the rich and powerful, that is.

Look, we don’t know the reason, and no-one is even sure if China has officially blocked access to Wikipedia again, after little more than a week of almost unfettered access to the world’s biggest, free and mostly accurate encyclopedia.

But one thing is certain: not everyone in China expected that the lifting of the Wikipedia restrictions were permanent, with the block able to be re-imposed at any time, be it a day later, a week later, a month later or more.

Heck, given that the latest James Bond movie, Casino Royale, is the very first Bond film to be officially distributed in the Chinese market (with only 20 foreign films given official screening status each year according to online reports), we in the West can easily forget that while we enjoy incredible freedoms, the Chinese are still going through amazing change at breakneck speed, and freedoms are sometimes a casualty of friendly fire.

The Chinese might make our iPods, computers, clothes and other technologies, often with some Western technological know how that the Chinese have rapidly learnt to use and further develop themselves, but if the same is happening with political systems and individual freedoms, it’s happening at a much slower pace than the availability of the next model of an Apple iPod.

Let’s hope that this hiccup in Wikipedia access is only temporary and that the world will once more say ‘xie xie’ and celebrate the Chinese Government’s wisdom in re-granting access to one of the world’s best and self-correcting online sources of information on just about anything.