Wikipedia blocked, again. - Now unblocked!

[sthubbar]

Looks like the Great Firewall of China has decided to disallow access to Wikipedia, again. I was just surfing the site yesterday, and maybe this morning. Now it only seems reachable through a proxy. This is from Beijing. How about other areas of China?

[Xiao Kui]

It might still be early to say whether it's blocked or just a slow connection speed and therefore timing out. There are some sites that I know for a fact are not blocked but i have to access via proxy because they time out unless you use one. At night the problem seems to be worse when there is a lot more net traffic.

I'm experiencing the same thing. Accessed without a proxy this morning but now I can't. (location: Kunming)

[dalaowai]

Stopped working in Shanghai yesterday as well.

Nothing agitates me more than getting a page cannot be displayed error due to the friendly firewall.

[Crivens200]

Blocked here again in deepest jiangsu province.

[liuzhou]

And in Guangxi

[roddy]

As danwei points out, they've blocked Wikipedia and unblocked Typepad. This is completely logical, and a great step forward on the road to a harmonious socialist society.

[Sarah_chen]

i have been tried to visit Wikipedia one year ago, that couldnt work at the time ,and now the same

[madizi]

The same in Hunan and probably all over China.

[tai4ji2x]

are people able to get through via gladder or other plugins?

[Prodigal Son]

The incompetency of whoever manages mainland access to "banned sites" is really unbelievable. Blocked for a year, unblocked; blocked, unblocked.

[madizi]

I understand that some political incorrect articles in WP are blocked, but I don't understand why whole WP??????

[anonymoose]

It seems like it has been unblocked again. At least I am able to access it here from Shanghai now, although I haven't been able to for the past few days.

[roddy]

Maybe they've finished editing it to fit the facts.

That's what's really odd about Wikipedia. If they don't like it, they could just edit it

[Lu]

That's the thing with wikipedia: you can edit it until the cows come home, if someone else disagrees with your facts your edits will be reverted. Perhaps that's what puts the Chinese gov't off.

[sthubbar]

It appears the powers that be are still playing around with Wikipedia. Upon the good news that it was directly addressable I tried and indeed it was. Odd because I was getting a "The Wikimedia Foundation servers are currently experiencing technical difficulties." message through anonymouse.org.

Then all of a sudden I was unable to directly access Wikipedia. Through theproxyfree.com, it is still accessible.

[madizi]

As for today, 8:30 am (Chinese time), I'm able to access it.

[liuzhou]

Yes, it seems to be back.

I'm off looking for Chinglish edits to controversial pages!

[Rincewind]

I can see wikipedia again too. I sometimes thing people are too quick to point at the political aspects as a reason for blocking. Wikipedia also contains quite allot of sexually explicit articles (trying to say without sounding like a old prude).

However, I have been working on a different wiki project for the last 10 months or so. Mainly because I couldn't get in to edit wikipedia. This other project is www.citizendium.org . They are still lacking quite allot of China related articles. So you have the opportunity to do things a fresh if you want.

[madizi]

Will Citizendium offer some other services than WP? Or will it be another copy of it?

[Rincewind]

The key difference is that citizendium uses expert editors (usually university professors) to check the articles for any inaccuracies or factual errors. There are also differences in the style of writing that gives a different feel to articles. There will also be space for photo galleries, multi media, audio and video in the near future