User:Laputa Sora/new sandbox

Editor notes: The intention of this draft is to enrich information for the article: Censorship of Wikipedia. Since it is a C-Class article with structured and complete information for censorship in various countries, I would like make effort in:


 * 1) Updating censorship events of Wikipedia in China
 * 2) Finding narratives of second hand and third hand sources to add credibility for the events
 * 3) Adding more supporting evidence for event that lacks detail explanation
 * 4) Adding missed events throughout the censorship event timeline
 * 5) Adding relevant contexts for the censorship events based on my technical expertise (Computer Network)

This would mean that I will spend time selecting and probing information to make sure that I am adding valuable information beyond the existing framework.

To do this, I will highlight parts that I added beyond the original article, for example:

The Chinese Wikipedia was launched in May 2001. Wikipedia received positive coverage in China's state press in early 2004 but was blocked on 3 June 2004, ahead of the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

The underlined text is added to explain an early censorship event of Wikipedia.

All sources are cited and the superscript number count which are specific for this draft article.

The total word count of added information is more than 2000 words. Draft Contribution:

China
Access to Wikipedia has varied over the years with the Chinese language version being controlled more tightly than other versions. As of April 2019, all versions of Wikipedia are blocked in Mainland China under the Great Firewall.

The Chinese Wikipedia was launched in May 2001. From 2004 to 2008, it encountered six large-scale blockings without warning and without prior notice in mainland China, of which one of the blockades was limited to political contents. Wikipedia received positive coverage in China's state press in early 2004 but was blocked on 3 June 2004, ahead of the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Proposals to practice self-censorship in a bid to restore the site were rejected by the Chinese Wikipedia community. However, a story by the International Herald Tribune comparing entries on the Chinese and English Wikipedias on topics such as Mao Zedong and Taiwan concluded that the Chinese entries were "watered down and sanitized" of political controversy. On 22 June 2004, access to Wikipedia was restored without explanation. Wikipedia was blocked again for unknown reasons in September but only for four days. The access to Wikipedia was blocked starting from September 23, 2004 and lasted only four days. Amid this blockade, Wikipedia is still accessible in parts of mainland China. Wikipedia was again blocked in China in October 2005. Wikipedia users Shi Zhao and Cui Wei wrote letters to technicians and authorities in an attempt to convince them to unblock the website. Part of the letter read, "By blocking Wikipedia, we lose a chance to present China's voice to the world, allowing evil cults, Taiwan independence forces and others ... to present a distorted image of China."

On October 19, 2005, The New York Times reported that the English Wikipedia was unblocked in China, although the Chinese Wikipedia remained blocked. For the next three years, the Chinese government only lifted the restriction to accessing Wikipedia during October 10 to October 23, 2006, November 9 to November 17, 2006 , June 15 to June 18, 2007 , July 21 to July 25, 2007, July 30 to August 2, 2007, and August 30 to August 31, 2007. New media researcher Andrew Lih blogged that he could not read the English-language article on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in China. Lih said that "There is no monolithically operating Great Firewall of China", noting that for users of various internet service providers in different locations in China—China Netcom in Beijing, China Telecom in Shanghai, and various providers in Anhui—the Chinese Wikipedia was blocked only in Anhui. Advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders praised Wikipedia's leaders for not self-censoring.

On 10 November 2006, Lih reported that the Chinese Wikipedia appeared to have been fully unblocked. Lih confirmed the full unblocking several days later and offered a partial analysis of the effects based on the rate of new account creation on the Chinese Wikipedia. Before the unblocking, 300–400 new accounts were created daily. In the four days after the unblocking, the rate of new registrations more than tripled to over 1,200 daily, making it the second fastest growing Wikipedia after the English version. Similarly, there were 75% more articles created in the week ending on 13 November than during the week before. On the same weekend that the Chinese Wikipedia passed the 100,000 article mark, Lih predicted that the second 100,000 would come quickly but that the existing body of Chinese Wikipedia users would have their hands full teaching the new users basic Wikipedia policies and norms.

On 16 November 2006, the Reuters news agency reported the main page of the Chinese Wikipedia could be displayed but not pages on some taboo political subjects, such as "4 June, [1989 protests]". However, subsequent reports suggested that both the Chinese and English versions had been reblocked the next day on 17 November. On July 31, 2008, the government of the People's Republic of China announced the freedom of information for the Beijing Olympic Games and lifted the blocking of many websites. On 6 September 2007, IDG News reported that the English Wikipedia was blocked again. On 2 April 2008, The Register reported that the blocks on the English and Chinese Wikipedias were lifted. This was confirmed by the BBC and came within the context of foreign journalists arriving in Beijing to report on the 2008 Summer Olympics and the International Olympic Committee's request for press freedom during the games. In September 2008, Jimmy Wales had a meeting with Cai Mingzhao, Vice Director of China's State Council Information Office. While no agreements were made, Wales believed that a channel of communication had been opened between Wikipedia's community and the PRC Government.

On November 28, 2010, the non-encrypted version of the Chinese Wikisource was blocked by TCP reset attack. In early 2012, Chinese Wikinews was blocked by TCP reset attack and DNS hijacking. However, when using HTTPS protocol to access Wikipedia, any page of the Wikimedia Foundation and its affiliated projects can be accessed normally (except for Chinese Wikinews under DNS hijacking). Chinese government used similar approach after implementing blocks to Wikinews to attack websites in response to political information posted on these platforms such as Github.

According to a report published in the American Economic Review in 2011, the blocking of the Chinese Wikipedia not only reduced the group size of its users but also decreased the unblocked users' contributions by 42.8% on average.

Chinese authorities started blocking access to the secure (HTTPS) version of the site on 31 May 2013. Although the non-secure (HTTP) version was still available, it was vulnerable to keyword filtering allowing individual articles to be selectively blocked. GreatFire urged Wikipedia and users to circumvent the block by accessing other IP addresses owned by Wikipedia with HTTPS. In 2013, after Jimmy Wales stated that Wikipedia will not tolerate "5 seconds" of censorship, Shen Yi, an Internet researcher at Fudan University in Shanghai said that while "Wikipedia is tough against the Chinese government, it may not necessarily be so grand when faced with US government or European justice systems' requirements to modify or delete articles or disclose information".

According to GreatFire, both the encrypted and unencrypted Chinese Wikipedia were blocked by TCP reset attack and DNS hijacking on 19 May 2015.

Since December 4, 2015, all websites under the Wikimedia Foundation have been blocked by the Chinese government. However, the block was lifted at 14:00 on December 6 of the same year, and most projects can be directly accessed again.

According to Great Fire, an online platform that monitored blocked websites and keywords since 2011, from May 19, 2015 to December 28, 2017, only Chinese, Cantonese (desktop version only, mobile version was not blocked until April 23, 2019), Wu language, Uyghur Wikipedia could not be accessed normally in mainland China, due to DNS hijacking. However, other language versions of Wikipedia can be accessed normally (including English Wikipedia with the most articles and some dialect Chinese versions).

Since June 2015, all Wikipedias redirect HTTP requests to the corresponding HTTPS addresses, thereby making encryption mandatory for all users and rendering the site inaccessible in China. As a result, Chinese censors cannot see which specific pages an individual is viewing and therefore cannot block a specific subset of pages (such as Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaobo or Tiananmen Square) as they did in past years.

Wales said he would fly to China to lobby the Chinese government to unlock the site within two weeks at the Leadership Energy Summit Asia 2015 in Kuala Lumpur on 2 December 2015. The government of the People's Republic of China completely blocked all language versions of the site again on 4 December. A large number of Chinese internet users complained about the block on social networks, although most of the complaints were deleted after a short period. However, it became possible to visit Wikipedia in other languages on 6 December in China again.

Wales met Lu Wei, the director of Cyberspace Administration of China on 17 December 2015 during the World Internet Conference held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang. Wales said that this was the first time they met and there was no consensus on specific issues but that the purpose of the meeting was for the two to "meet and know each other". Wales told Lu Wei how Wikipedia and Wikimedia work in the world and expressed hopes to meet Lu Wei and the Cyberspace Administration of China regularly in the future. When a reporter asked if he would order Wikipedia to hide some information to maintain stable operations in China, he responded "Never." Still, Wales' own words have been censored; he said that the improvements in machine translation might make it "no longer possible" for authorities to control flows of information in the future during a panel discussion. However, in the official translation, his statement was that such improvements will help governments to better analyze online communications.

The regulation towards Wikipedia escalated during the following three years. On December 28, 2017, the Japanese Wikipedia (desktop version) was blocked in mainland China. The mobile version was then blocked in August 2018. From August 24, 2018, the Great Firewall began to use SNI detection to block Chinese, Japanese and Uyghur Wikipedia domain names, which made bypassing network blocking by modifying the hosts file or replacing the DNS ineffective. Since September 29, 2018, the plaintext English Wikipedia was blocked by TCP reset attack, but the encrypted English Wikipedia still accessible.

On April 23, 2019, the Wikipedia site was completely blocked.

Since April 23, 2019, Wikipedia was completely blocked in mainland China, and its homepage and all language versions could not be accessed normally. The blocking method was DNS hijacking. Among them, Chinese, Japanese, and Uyghur Wikipedia were treated with stricter regulation by implementing TCP reset attack reset and SNI blocking, and the TCP reset block of plaintext English Wikipedia has not been lifted. On the next day, the block of English Wikipedia escalated to a site-wide blocking server name indication.

From June 10, 2019, the mobile version of Wikimedia Commons was blocked by DNS hijacking, while Wikimedia Commons desktop version has not been blocked at the time.

From July 2019, the desktop versions of English Wikinews and Chinese Wikiquote was blocked. The record of the website Great Fire shows that the English Wikinews was attacked by DNS hijacking, while the Chinese Wikiquote was both attacked by DNS hijacking and SNI blocking based on TCP reset. Since October, the blocking has been further escalated, and the mobile version of the Chinese Wikiquote has also been blocked.

Since November 2019, the mobile version of Chinese Wikiversity has been blocked by DNS hijacking, and Chinese Wikiversity desktop version was blocked one month later.

Finally, all projects of the he WMF (Wikimedia Foundation) were almost completely blocked in mainland China. Since December 2019, the IPv4 address of the Wikimedia Foundation server in San Francisco (198.35.26.96) has been blocked. Wikipedians in the communities also reports that since 2020, the IPv4 address of the Wikimedia Foundation server in Singapore (103.102. 166.224) and the IPv4 address in Ashburn, USA (208.80.154.224) were blocked. In addition, the Wikimedia Foundation’s media server (upload.wikimedia.org) were also blocked, which caused all connections of the Wikimedia Foundation’s media servers in mainland China to time out. Without the connecting to the media server, Wikipedians in Mainland China could not update images to Wikipedia articles.

On 23 September 2020, Wikimedia's application for the status as an official observer at the World Intellectual Property Organization was rejected by the Chinese government because China's representative claimed that they had "spotted a large amount of content and disinformation in violation of [the] One China principle" on webpages affiliated with Wikimedia, and Wikimedia's Taiwan branch has been "carrying out political activities ... which could undermine the state's sovereignty and territorial integrity".

On 24 October 2020, a Chinese citizen in Zhoushan, Zhejiang was penalized by the local police for "illegally visiting Wikipedia". The authorities reported that he used a VPN software called "Blue Lantern" to search for information on Wikipedia, and police visited his house short after his search on Wikipedia. According to the public report, this is the first case in mainland China where someone was explicitly punished for browsing Wikipedia. The official report of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee issued an announcement for this case. From early 2019 to October 2020, after downloading and installing the software "Blue Lantern" through Baidu, the Zhang Tao (offender) repeatedly used the software to "illegally access Wikipedia to obtain information", and was visited by the police on the 24th at his house. The official announcement also listed the man’s name and part of his address. The police referred to the provisions of Articles 6 and 14 of the "Interim Regulations of the People's Republic of China on the Administration of International Networking of Computer Information Networks", and decided to give Zhang Tao an administrative punishment of warning, ordered him to stop illegally connecting to the international network in the future. Some Wikipedia editors believe that the Chinese Wikipedia community should condemn this incident.

On 5 October 2021, the Chinese government rejected the Wikimedia Foundation's bid for observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization again for the same reason in 2020.

Despite being censored in mainland China, and as VPNs are normally not allowed to edit Wikipedia, Wikipedia administrators from China have permitted IP block exemptions for a select number of mainland users. Such users are recruited to change the editorial content on Wikipedia in support of Chinese government's viewpoint and/or to support the election of pro-Beijing administrators on Wikipedia, with the aim of gaining control of Wikipedia. Academics suggested that "China urgently needs to encourage and train Chinese netizens to become Wikipedia platform opinion leaders and administrators ... [who] can adhere to socialist values and form some core editorial teams." The pro-Beijing Wikipedia community, the Wikimedians of Mainland China (WMC), threatened to report Wikipedia editors to Hong Kong's national security police hotline over the disputed article "2019–2020 Hong Kong protests" characterized by edit warring. The WMC has also clashed with Wikipedia editors from Taiwan, not only over Wikipedia's content, but also making death threats made against Taiwan's community of Wikipedians. One Taiwanese editor suggested that it was not just patriotic mainlanders, but a "larger structural coordinated strategy the government has to manipulate these platforms" beside Wikipedia, such as Twitter and Facebook. On 13 September 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation banned seven Wikipedia users and removed administrator privileges from twelve users that were part of Wikimedians of Mainland China. Maggie Dennis, the foundation's vice present of community resilience and sustainability, said that there had been a yearlong investigation into "infiltration concerns" that threatened the "very foundations of Wikipedia". Dennis observed that the infiltrators had tried to promote "the aims of China, as interpreted through whatever filters they may bring to bear". Suggesting possible links to the Communist Party of China, Dennis said "We needed to act based on credible information that some members (not all) of that group [WMC] have harassed, intimidated, and threatened other members of our community, including in some cases physically harming others, in order to secure their own power and subvert the collaborative nature of our projects".