Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-06-05/In the media

Hmm. How shall the WMF go about actively breaking down the Great Firewall of China? *evil smirk* Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty 10:22, 7 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Let me copy a relevant comment, Mentioning Wikipedia on Chinese Skype triggers surveillance:
 * The paper for this BusinessWeek article ("Skype's Been Hijacked in China, and Microsoft Is O.K. With It") refers to this Usenix paper (slides) which links to these Chinese Skype censorship stoplists and surveillance triggers, which in 2011 contained:

中文维基百科 ("Chinese-language Wikipedia") 维基百科 ("Wikipedia") 中文维基百科加密版 ("Encrypted version of the Chinese-language Wikipedia")
 * While "中文维基百科加密版" occurs in the most recent 3/8/2013 version of the surveillance trigger list, the other two do not.
 * See also https://en.greatfire.org/search/all/wikipedia for a list of blocked Wikipedia articles, chinese and english. --Atlasowa (talk) 12:39, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm confused; the http version of Wikipedia is perfectly accessible in China - I'm posting this right now in Beijing without a VPN. There is the normal keyword blocking, in which pages with certain sensitive terms will not load and render Wikipedia inaccessible for about 1 minute, but that is true for any website accessed in China. I just surfed over to the Chinese version and that seems to work fine too. Why does the article say that blocking the https is "almost completely cutting off access to those in China"?--Danaman5 (talk) 16:30, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmm. I wrote based on the articles ... can you access Tiananmen Square protests of 1989?  Go  Phightins  !  17:20, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
 * The lede of the referenced TheNextWeb article says they "blocked the encrypted version" of Wikipedia, not Wikipedia as a whole, i.e. they blocked the loophole allowing uncensored access. The Signpost head and lede are thus misleading. --R. S. Shaw (talk) 02:39, 9 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, it's not entirely misleading. A version was blocked, yes, and people viewing the pages are now subjected to government oversight and censored content. Still, I've changed the title to be more specific. :-) Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 02:48, 9 June 2013 (UTC)
 * My fault on the title. I just jotted something down at the top of the Google Doc to reference which was going to be the lead story, and forgot to go back to change it. Thanks for doing so, Ed.  Go  Phightins  !  19:12, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that the https version was never completely free of censorship in China. Keyword blocking works based on what is on the page, I don't think which version you use matters. There was a period during which the http version was blocked, but the https version was not, that's why people started using the latter, but that doesn't mean that it was free of censorship. I could be wrong on that, though, I didn't use the https version much after the http version was unblocked. I seem to remember hitting censorship when I did use it though. (and no, I can't access Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 here. Strangely, it loaded once completely, but then when I tried reloading it, it gave me the usual error. Sometimes the keyword censorship is slow to catch up)--Danaman5 (talk) 13:47, 11 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Interesting that unlike the Wikipedia in the 80s video, the Twitter in the 80s video assumed that users dialed a number using a modem to go online online to tweet. Their 80s vision of Wikipedia seems to be a memory-resident (possibly CD ROM-based) product. Certainly a better vision would involve dialing a 1200-baud modem to go online so you could actually edit the encyclopedia! Wbm1058 (talk) 16:47, 12 June 2013 (UTC)


 * https://upload.wikimeida.org also blocked in China --Shizhao (talk) 14:17, 13 June 2013 (UTC)