Wikipedia, as one of the most popular online encyclopedias, is not only used by ordinary people out of personal interests but also used by professionals as the first step for their research. I consider myself as a good example: I surf both English and Chinese versions of Wikipedia almost everyday, and I also start with Wikipedia for background on my journalistic studies. One could say that Wikipedia has gradually become part of people’s lives.

Up to December ^4th 2007, the Chinese Wikipedia has about 155,667 articles, and has become the 11^th language with over 100,000 articles with a sustainable growth to catch up with other three major languages that have over 500,000 articles. This is a significant development for Chinese Wikipedia; however, one of its biggest problems is its blocking in mainland China as part of the government’s strict and complex system of internet censorship.

According to Wikipedia, the blocking first started in June 2004 due to the 15^th anniversary of Tiananmen Square protests of 1989; Wikipedia’s ban in China has been constantly lifted, only to be re-imposed afterwards, and was completely blocked once more by the “Great Firewall” again this August. This has drawn a great attention from all over the world, including from wikipedians, bloggers, and professionals. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has commented on the Chinese blocking: “You can’t block the Internet and have economic growth, particularly censoring a free educational source.”

The reasons and techniques of blocking Wikipedia in mainland China are complicated, as one blogger pointed out. As a PR professional in China, he also said “Blocks are, rather, implemented at various levels corresponding to different parts of China’s network infrastructure”. However, I don’t agree with one element of his reasons for Chinese censorship, in that it is done as a way of “gaining leverage over foreign companies and finding ways to give domestic companies an advantage“. Despite the possible economic purposes, the blocking of access to Wikipedia in mainland is mostly political, banning the people from free but possiblly sensitive information.

The CCP gives out the order and internet services providers implements with different provinces and cities at various levels. A former-professor as well as a wikipedian, Andrew Lih, has provided a clear chart to show the access at different locations during the 2006 blocked-unblocked-blocked period. Lih also provided statistics and graphs charting the number of new users, suggesting that the blocking had restrained and damaged the development of Chinese Wikipedia.

The newest the controversy is about the Chinese online encyclopedia Baidu Baike, founded by the largest Chinese search engine company in April 2006. Since its creation, Baidu Baike has been known as a copy of Wikipedia with a self-censorship “to avoid offending the Chinese government”. Business Week has pointed out a big problem in a recent article that Baidu Baike “lifts content from Wikipedia’s Chinese edition without proper attribution and inclusion of the GNU Free Documentation License.” And when Lih tried to contact people from Baidu Baike just simply to inform them about the GFDL, he was refused by them because Baidu feels threatened by Wikipedia.

I recall a few months ago, when I was surfing Baidu and discovered their new encyclopedia, I found that a lot of content was copied word-for-word from Wikipedia. However, checking Baidu Baike last week, I didn’t find as much Wikipedia content as before. Maybe Baidu is trying to fix this problem, but it’s still very immature to stay away from using the simple and free GFDL and to even avoid talking about the problem. One of the possible reasons is that perhaps Baidu doesn’t want to have any contact with Wikipedia, since the latter has sensitive topics with opinions neither Baidu nor the CCP wants to hear.

While Wikipedia is currently being blocked in mainland China and Baidu Baike is still in development to becoming the most popular online encyclopedia, the sharing of free information is inevitable. According to Wikipedia itself, 46% of its users are connected from mainland China through different ways and 29 out of 86 administrators come from the mainland as well. Meanwhile, other forms of Web 2.0 websites, where the content is generated by its users, are flourishing in China. Those with non-sensitive political or religious topics, such as personal blogs are a hit in China. Other wiki-based websites are developing too; the best example is Cinewiki, a Chinese online encyclopedia dedicated to cinema and film-related topics. In my opinion, Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 sites are unavoidable in mainland China; everything is just a matter of time.