Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

ooni.torproject.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 157 posts

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#62

Post by HAL9000Ti »

I assume that this is in preparation of the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Tiananen massacre, they always make changes to the censorship when a big event is comming up.

For instance for the 2008 olympics many blocked sites were opened up, and conversely they tighten everything up before every National People's Congress elections.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#63

Post by paulgerhardt »

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.

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.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#65

Post by vbezhenar »

anfilt wrote: post #20

Sigh and this is why plain text SNI is was not a good idea...

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 China, I would prefer censored HTTP access over unavailable HTTPS any day.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#66

Post by CallMePK »

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

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#67

Post by ekianjo »

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.

The English version of Wikipedia is not free of bias either. Wikipedia is not a source of truth for everything out there.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#68

Post by majos »

magpi3 wrote: post #43
ddalex wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can download it - the index of human knowledge isn't that big that it wouldn't fit on a stick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Of...

I am in China:-). That link is blocked.

HackerNews isn't blocked in China? That's surprising.

Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

#69

Post by ksec »

Mirioron wrote: post #38
onion2k wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does China's micromanagement of the domestic flow of information result in more or less prosperity for their people? The assumption you're making is that the Chinese government, or any government actually, optimizes for the prosperity of the people. Governments optimize for the prosperity of some people. In China that appears to be the ruling elite. In America it's the wealthy. Here in the UK it's the establishment (…

I think most governments do want to improve the life of the people, but it simply gets lost in the power struggle. You can't gain power without agreement from the king-makers and that agreement comes with strings attached. You also have to deal with the opposition and at least in American politics, they seem to be quite unreasonable at times. (Regardless which party is the opposition.)

This. And one reason why I don't think he is pessimistic at all, just the truth. Although the reason for that truth may not be what he thought it was.

I wish more people watch the Documentary, Yes Minster, it perfectly describe modern days politics with sense of humour, and many of it are still true even if it was done some 40 years ago.

Post reply on HN