Wikipedia blocked again in China

Well, that sure didn’t last long.  I blogged last time about Wikipedia being active again in China, but that apparently  is now no longer the case.  Wikipedia is again banned in the country according to CNN. 

Here is the link to the article:  http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/17/china.internet.ap/index.html

The easing of a ban on the popular online encyclopedia in China was short-lived.  Barely a week after Wikipedia viewers were able to access the Web site — after a year-long ban — they reported Friday that it was blocked again in several parts of China.

Chinese Web surfers and free-speech advocates had earlier welcomed the apparent lifting of a ban on the English and Chinese versions of the site that provides free information written and edited by its users, although skeptics had voiced fears the end of the ban would be temporary.  This is troubling and it appears like China is again trying to curtail  freedom of speech rights of its citizens.   Citizens were ecstatic that  Wikipedia was active again and available to those who had internet access. 

“It was great news for us,” said Yuan Mingli, 33, a software engineer in Shanghai who has contributed articles on computer science and Chinese historical figures to the site. “China’s Internet users are not different from other countries’ users. Wikipedia is a very important source of information for us.” It wasn’t immediately clear if Wikipedia was inaccessible due to technical glitches or because government censors had blocked the site again. The Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Information Industry did not immediately respond when contacted for comment Friday.

China is worried about the freedom that Wikipedia allows its users to exhibit and that again appears to be why it is shut down.  The Communist government still rules  with an iron fist in the country.  The government has waged a battle to control the anarchic Internet and filter the information Chinese can get. Police employ an array of measures, from sophisticated filters and detection software that hunts for sensitive words to having officers monitor Web traffic.  As a result, surfing the Web in China is a very different experience from that in much of the world. Because almost anyone can add to and edit listings in Wikipedia, the site is famously freewheeling, addressing sensitive topics that pose a challenge to Beijing’s control.

The blocking doesn’t come as much of a surprise to many.   Experts had earlier expressed skepticism over the Chinese government’s unannounced lifting of the ban on the popular site, saying it could be only temporary.  “It’s great to see Wikipedia unblocked, though in China an unblocking is probationary: it might be blocked again in a day, a week, or a month,” Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, said earlier. 

In the context of a politically censored environment … Wikipedia becomes … also a place to engage, to debate, to share information and to spread information otherwise being forbidden,” said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley.  China  and its communist regime has blocked this valuable resource again and this is quite troubling.  It appears like this ban will be in effect for a long time now, which is not good news for the global community or the Chinese people.