I lived in China for 15 years. This is probably only temporary leading up to May 35. It happens every year.
China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
81–90 of 157 posts
Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
#82Earlier 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.
Very few Taiwanese today associate themselves with mainland. Less than 10% percent of the population were refugees two decades ago, and it is even less today, with second generation mainlanders being more or less assimilated.
Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
#83Of course they are, it's almost June 4th which is the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. You know that events is going to be the featured article on one of the Wikipedia editions, or at least be mentioned in the "On this day" section.
Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When I see that articles about the same thing in different languages state different and incompatible numbers, then I always think that this is an obvious and easily solveable problem; separate the data from the language and reference it in the text. That way each language uses the same data. This shouldn't just be done with numbers, but with dates, and other easily convertible information.
Yes, this will create conflicts as to which information is correct, but Wikipedia has had this problem since forever, and deals with it.
Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
#85Sigh 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…
> millions of useful articles blocked because of few offending ones
Yes, freedom requires sacrifices. Freedom is not for feeble hearted.
This is an important point. I'd say keeping it in mind is more important for citizens of free countries today, than Chinese.
The sole fact that an argument like this being brought more and more in the West, where it wouldn't fly even 10 years ago, say just how much closer to China the West has become.
Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
#86Considering how politicized wikipedia ( like most of tech industry has gotten in recent years ), doesn't shock me. Jimmy Wales has pretty much come out and said wikipedia will no longer be user driven but ideology driven. Which is one of the reasons the other co-founder of wikipedia has criticized wales and wikipedia.
Wikipedia is great for most generic topics, but for "sensitive" topics, it's pretty much propaganda. Considering how heavily wikipedia is censored by wikipedia itself, maybe a taste of their own medicine will make them change their position, but I doubt it.
Sadly, as more and more people use the internet, it'll be censored more and more by the elites in china, US, russia, EU, etc. What we are seeing is the internet becoming an overt tool of propaganda rather than a platform of discussion or exchange of ideas. Even worse, it seems like there are tons of support for censorship, especially amongst the young "educated" demographics.
Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's you. This kind of lazy pessimism strikes me as a peculiar privilege of people who've grown up accustomed to living under a government that, while unavoidably imperfect, does in fact give consideration to the rights and desires of ordinary citizens. 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. On the other h…
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 bother to do if it was only concerned with a wealthy elite (note that I said "only", obviously the government does plenty of things that are for a wealthy elite). It funds welfare programmes and state pensions that have no direct benefit to the rich elite. It enforces a minimum wage that have no direct benefit to the rich elite. It enforces worker rights and safety regulations that have no direct benefit to the rich elite. It has a progressive tax regime that has no direct benefit to the rich elite. It allows ordinary citizens a degree of freedom of movement, expression, political affiliation and democratic expression that has no direct benefit to the rich elite.
And yes, it's easy to find examples in all these areas where the implementation falls far short of the theory. But nonetheless there is still a huge difference between both the theory and implementation of government in the UK vs a country like China, North Korea, Iran, etc.
Criticism of every government is useful and important, but criticism should be grounded in reality. In a fair and reasonable assessment of what is done right as well as what is done wrong. Instead, most criticism I see of western governments by their own citizens is incredibly facile; uninformed by fact, and ignorant of both the history and reality of its political institutions, substituting nuance for lazy stereotypes and received opinions about the supposed inherent corruption and incompetence of all politics and politicians.
Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
#88Chinese government are hyper coward, it's going to be fun. ”You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.” – Winnie the Pooh
Side-note: Winnie the Pooh has been used as a sort of caricature of Xi Jinping.
Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since Wikipedia can be dumped onto a memory card I am not sure how effective the ban is supposed to be. It will constrain its spread but it is very hard to block all means of transmission of information.
On the contrary it will be extremely effective at keeping 95% of the Chinese population ignorant of Wikipedia.
How many were already using Wikipedia in the first place? I assume that before the ban happened it was already pretty much hidden from results in Baidu and the like?
Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
The English version of Wikipedia is not free of bias either. Wikipedia is not a source of truth for everything out there.
When I see that articles about the same thing in different languages state different and incompatible numbers, then I always think that this is an obvious and easily solveable problem; separate the data from the language and reference it in the text. That way each language uses the same data. This shouldn't just be done with numbers, but with dates, and other easily convertible information. Yes, this will create conf…
This is currently being done on Wikidata for information that is more easily represented in a database.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
Some infoboxes on Wikipedia have values that are automatically synced to the related Wikidata entry.