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China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

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Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#131

Post by klibertp »

vaylian wrote: post #93
CallMePK wrote: post #66

I still remember that last year during my internship in Mainland China, clone git repository from GitHub and GitLab is a pain and my professor even have to use VPN too. China is basically hell for developers. I am afraid the new generations in China will no longer know about the real Internet. *sigh

Interesting comment. You make it sound like the real internet happens to be US-centric. Yes, many important projects are hosted on Gitlab and Github, but there are also other ways to share code. And these alternatives might not be that well known to us developers in the western world.

> but there are also other ways to share code. And these alternatives might not be that well known to us developers in the western world.

What ways are that? We do know about sneakernet and emailing tarballs, but I guess it has to be something else? I'm curious.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#132

Post by [deleted] »

StreamBright wrote: post #120
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just run by a party that happens to identify themselves as the Communist Party China (CPC). Also the kids that still have to take Marxist and Mao theory in high school and university wish the country would admit to no longer being communist also.

Yeah but naming can be safely ignored. Examples: North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic

[deleted]

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#133

Post by dwohnitmok »

yorwba wrote: post #58
bspammer wrote: post #30

This makes me sad. Wikipedia is surely one of humanity's greatest accomplishments to date. Having such a resource be off limits to a large section of our population is truly depressing. Of course, there was always the language barrier, but zh.wikipedia.org could definitely have been as high quality as the English version given the chance.

Is zh.wikipedia.org not as high-quality as the English version in your experience? I don't use it that frequently, but for topics like famous Chinese people or linguistics of Sinitic languages, the English article is often just a stub, while the Chinese version has all the information I'm looking for.

On the whole I would say the English version is better. In general articles about China tend to be pretty good (modern and ancient history, people as you pointed out) and can be richer than their English equivalents. I actually haven't found the linguistics articles about Sinitic languages to be all that helpful. My impression is that they usually have less information than their English equivalents and often have sections translated from their English counterparts (I'm fairly sure the translation is in that direction because the English is more detailed than the Chinese and the original sources are usually in English), but I suppose YMMV.

However as you get into the various sciences, the quality and coverage of articles drops off very quickly.

I also find that the tone of the articles can also veer off a little bit from the usual encyclopedia-detached tone of Wikipedia (at least somewhat more so than the English version)

I still prefer it to Baidu's online encyclopedia, but it's not as excellent as the English version.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#134

Post by dwohnitmok »

amai wrote: post #92

Is Stackoverflow still accessible in China? Or how do programmers work there?

Yes but it's very very slow (as in on the order of minutes for a page to load). I think this has to do with how Stack Overflow's front-end code is written. There's some non-essential Javascript that is blocked by the Great Firewall which blocks the rest of the page from loading for a long time before the page gives up and displays a banner that some Javascript failed to load.

All programmers I know have software to circumvent the Great Firewall and view it as a necessary condition of their profession.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#135

Post by avaika »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #63
yorwba wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is zh.wikipedia.org not as high-quality as the English version in your experience? I don't use it that frequently, but for topics like famous Chinese people or linguistics of Sinitic languages, the English article is often just a stub, while the Chinese version has all the information I'm looking for.

In my experience zh.wikipedia.org is largely authored by Taiwanese residents. The quality is high but local narratives are often written with some bias not entirely unlike what one would expect from a displaced population resulting from a fairly recent civil war.

It's not just zh / en problem. Probably it's every language problem.

Out of fun I compare some Russian vs English articles on controversial topics (e.g. Stalin / Nicholas II / etc). It's really interesting to see how it's different. In most cases it matches to the traditional point of view in native speaker community.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#137

Post by seanmcdirmid »

StreamBright wrote: post #120
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just run by a party that happens to identify themselves as the Communist Party China (CPC). Also the kids that still have to take Marxist and Mao theory in high school and university wish the country would admit to no longer being communist also.

Yeah but naming can be safely ignored. Examples: North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic

Ya, but just don't say China isn't communist in a Chinese public forum, you might offend a 同志.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#138

Post by ekianjo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #128
ekianjo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are corporations generally run as central control, or does it vary wildly? Corporations want to be centrally controlled, but the control is so poorly organized in most cases it's chaotic at best. And then there are multiple forms of organizations, not every of them works top-down, there are organizations that leave a lot of opportunities for working level employees to propose new ideas and initiatives.

> there are organizations that leave a lot of opportunities for working level employees to propose new ideas and initiatives. Note that's still central control, just with fatter signalling pipe which can send ideas upstairs, and not just results. Directions and evaluations still come from the top.

> Directions and evaluations still come from the top.

Precisely not as I have pointed out. It's like saying a democracy is a centrally controlled system as well, since you only have one government. But in practice the government listens to the people in order to decide what to do next. It goes both ways.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#139

Post by klibertp »

stupidcar wrote: post #87
onion2k wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't take notice of all the ways their government chooses not to oppress them, because they wrongly imagine this is some natural state of things. If you're looking for a way to describe how good your government is and you come up with "Think how much worse it could be!" then I think the government has failed in its duty. There's a spectrum of government effectiveness that goes from "actively oppressing the peop…

> If you're looking for a way to describe how good your government is and you come up with "Think how much worse it could be!" then I think the government has failed in its duty. Yes, it would have, but many governments, including the UK, can be described in far better terms than this, and my point was that living under such a government can blind you to them. The UK government does many things that it would not both…

> It funds welfare programmes and state pensions ... It enforces worker rights ... a degree of freedom of movement, expression, political affiliation and democratic expression

I always thought the people in power do this because they learned the hard way that revolutions and uprisings are frightening and that conceding to some, mostly trivial, requests from the rest of the people is a good way to prevent them from happening. As you point out, China, NK, Iran, Saudi Arabia & co. show that there are other ways of doing the same that work just as well (for now, at least - and with differing sets of side-effects, obviously), but they all have the same goal: to stay in power and rule over the people.

I'm not saying it's intrinsically bad or anything, but I think that saying the people ruling the West are all idealists who wish to serve the people, while people in the exact same positions elsewhere in the world are power-hungry despots seems kind of... too optimistic, maybe?

There was this consul in ancient Rome (IIRC) who was a farmer, was appointed as a leader to win the war, then he won the war and then left his office to go back to his farm. There's probably a reason why this became a legend - it wouldn't be this famous a tale if things like that used to happen every other day.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#140

Post by vbezhenar »

bo1024 wrote: post #124
vbezhenar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How SNI is helping there? You still will have the entire website blocked. Clear HTTP would help, as they could block few selected pages and rest would be available. I don't understand this entire movement to HTTPS. Some people think that governments won't dare to block Wikipedia, Amazon or Google? Well, they dared and now you have millions of useful articles blocked because of few offending ones. If I would live in a…

Over plain http, how would you solve the problem of a government modifying pages in transit or replacing them entirely with a new version? I suppose you could use the https public key infrastructure with digital signatures so that visitors know whether they're seeing the original...

Well, if you want that property, technically there was NULL encryption algorithm in early HTTPS versions (probably it's not supported now, but there's nothing unusual about it). So you'll have page in cleartext, including all headers (so censors can drop the connection if they don't like it), but you'll have associated checksums and certificates, so changes should be detectable.
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