China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia (opens in new tab)

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.

On the whole I would say the English version is better. In general articles about China tend to be pretty good (modern and ancient history, people as you pointed out) and can be richer than their English equivalents. I actually haven't found the linguistics articles about Sinitic languages to be all that helpful. My impression is that they usually have less information than their English equivalents and often have sections translated from their English counterparts (I'm fairly sure the translation is in that direction because the English is more detailed than the Chinese and the original sources are usually in English), but I suppose YMMV.

However as you get into the various sciences, the quality and coverage of articles drops off very quickly.

I also find that the tone of the articles can also veer off a little bit from the usual encyclopedia-detached tone of Wikipedia (at least somewhat more so than the English version)

I still prefer it to Baidu's online encyclopedia, but it's not as excellent as the English version.

"it is very hard to block all means of transmission of information."

I think this is something to understand about modern political information manipulation/restriction.

The 1.0 version totalitarian censorship aimed for full information control. This is what the soviets and pre-1990s CCP tried to do. It's difficult because (as you say) information is hard to control.

The 2.0 version is about enough control. You can use a vpn (or memory stick), but most won't. This gives one version of events a major advantage over the others. Easy-to-find praise for the government, difficult-to-find dissent.It's about dominant influence, not absolute control. When needed, regimes can temporarily increase control, like erdogan did during the last turkish coup attempt.

A soft paralel is social media "bubbles." They don't "control" the information you can access, but they are enough to influence your opinions in a direction. There are lots of exceptions, but on average, these have a big influence on who we think the good and bad guys are.

On the contrary it will be extremely effective at keeping 95% of the Chinese population ignorant of Wikipedia.

You are right but no need for a memory card. Hundreds of millions of Chinese tourists go aboard[1] every year. Most of them travel within Asia so most HN readers don't feel it. Let alone VPN that most educated people can use if they really want to.

[1]https://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/nielsenglobal/cn/docs/Ou...

I hope you are not a wumao. The salient thing about github and other similar resources is not that they are developed by people in the US and owned by a US company. People from all over the world use it. There is nothing intrinsically 'US' about the content itself.

On the other hand, the GFW excluding much content from outside China makes the China Internet experience particularly Chinese and not the "real Internet".

For a software developer (or student thereof), the useful parts of the internet are indeed quite US-centric.

Off the top of my head, losing access to any of the following platforms will hamper your professional development: Github, Stack Overflow, cloud services leaders (AWS, GCP, MS Azure, etc.), Coursera, Udacity, Youtube, Khan Academy, Google Search, Google groups, Slack. At best, you'll have to use a VPN, or maybe resort to a domestically developed and probably inferior alternative. At worst, no such alternative exists.

> but there are also other ways to share code. And these alternatives might not be that well known to us developers in the western world.

What ways are that? We do know about sneakernet and emailing tarballs, but I guess it has to be something else? I'm curious.

I think he just meant that the "real internet" is the one where you can go to a website that isn't controlled by the Chinese government?

There are probably other ways but they lack the network effect of people already being there, and the fact that many major companies use Github to distribute and administer their open source projects.

In the West we have the choice to use the service that gives us all these benefits. Mmm, choices.

Well, at least I don't think our governments would actively stop us from finding and using them.

Sound like Orwell, maybe paraphrased.

Additional side-note: Winne the Pooh is not banned in China, despite what the media is reporting.

> 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.

Over plain http, how would you solve the problem of a government modifying pages in transit or replacing them entirely with a new version? I suppose you could use the https public key infrastructure with digital signatures so that visitors know whether they're seeing the original...

That's called "domain fronting", the major cloud providers disallow it and enforce that the Host header must match the SNI.

You can only do that if you can present a single valid certificate for all of the hosts behind the IP address.

And I just tried. i It's blocked

I am in China:-). That link is blocked.

Nice

Were there protests in previous notable anniversaries?

Yeah, this seems like it's done for domestic reasons, and the timing might well be dominated by simple administrative delays.

Restricting access to information will help the Chinese government retain power over the Chinese people. That's the point..

I assume they have their own wikipedia.