Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-08-14/Interwiki report

Status and community news
As of Saturday, 5 August, 2006, the Chinese Language Wikipedia contained about 81,458 articles. Of these, 70 articles are considered Featured Articles (Traditional Chinese: 特色條目, literally Special Articles). Until March 2005, Chinese Wikipedia had no formal mechanism to select Featured Pictures (Traditional Chinese: 特色圖片, literally Special Pictures). Since that time, however, 31 pictures have been selected as Featured Pictures. Counting those that were chosen before the formal process was established, there are 67 Featured Pictures in total.

Chinese Wikimedia Conference 2006
The Chinese Wikipedia Community is currently gearing up for its first ever Wikimedia Conference. The conference will be held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 26 August to 27 August, three weeks after Wikimania 2006. In addition to prominent editors within the Chinese Wikipedia community, Jimmy Wales is scheduled to appear at the conference as the first speaker on the first day, 26 August.

Spoken Wikipedia Project
As of August 2006, the Chinese Wikipedia community is beginning to create a spoken Wikipedia. However, the endeavor will create some challenges, as spoken Chinese consists of at least a dozen mutually unintelligible languages. The challenge will be somewhat lessened with the existence of vernacular Min Nan (zh-min-nan) and Cantonese (zh-yue) versions of Wikipedia.

Media reports
The Chinese Wikipedia has received more press coverage in recent times. Almost all press coverage surrounds the overall availability and the future potential of Wikipedia. Another article criticizes the People's Republic of China's decision to censor Wikipedia. Another article revolves around the perpetual argument amongst Taiwan and Mainland China users over the political status of Taiwan.

Chinese Wikipedia blocked in Florida
Since 7 August, 2006, Wikimedia proxy services in Florida have not been able to access the Chinese Wikipedia, the Wikimania 2006 Introduction pages or the Chinese Wikimedia Conference pages in Meta-Wiki. Some Wikipedians in Mainland China considered the block to be a URL-level block, believing that it might be related to a 2-page news article, "Wikipedia-maniac", that was reported in the 6 August issue of Beijing News (新京報).

As a result of PRC's policy of filtering the internet (see Internet censorship in mainland China), Wikipedia has been blocked in Mainland China since October 2005. The blocking technique is rather trivial and easy to get around, and a number of work-arounds exist; however, these are intentionally not well publicized, for fear of having them blocked as well.