For some time Wikipedia has been blocked in China – until today, that is. I have no idea why it suddenly works. I’m not even sure why, specifically, it was ever blocked in the first place. It has been off and on in the past two years, but I haven’t been able to access it for several months.
Jimmy Wales has been critical of Google and Microsoft for allowing what he termed censorship in their China operations. He stubbornly refused any such thing on Wikipedia, making this highly public about a month ago. That approach may have prolonged the wait for those of us hungry to eat up all that user generated knowledge, so it comes as a surprise to suddenly get access. Will it last? My guess is that it will.
Now, if only they’d unblock Technorati, things woudl really start to look up.
Ken Carroll
pretzellogic on 
Andrew Cockerham on 
Dave on
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Okay, it’s unblocked now, but can you access every topic on the Wikipedia website over there? I hope there will be a lot more Chinese translations of the English articles now.
It is a bit annoying that so many sites are blocked in China, though it is becoming fewer and fewer. However I assume you are using Firefox to browse the web. One of the greatest tools I’ve discovered to get around that little annoyance is an Open Source plugin called TOR. There is a Firefox plugin that works great. Basically it is your own little proxy. So you are surfing the web and run across a blocked site. Simply click the Tor button in Firefox and refresh the page, miraculously the site appears.
Highly recommended. Though if you leave it always on it will slow down your surfing.
More details on the ‘unblock’
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/online/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003251388
I have been using a the http://www.shysurfer.com/ anonymous site to access wikipedia and the bbc in China, this worked sporadically and was slow but if your are patient will get there in the end.
just use a proxy site , and it will skip round all blocks.
{ 1 trackback }