Sherry Chandler » More on Wikipedia
More on Wikipedia
from the Washington Post:
BEIJING — When access to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, was disrupted across China last October, a lanky chemical engineer named Shi Zhao called his Internet service provider to complain. A technician confirmed what Shi already suspected: Someone in the government had ordered the site blocked again.
Who and why were mysteries, Shi recalled, but the technician promised to pass his complaint on to higher authorities if he put it in writing.
…
Officials tolerated Wikipedia at first, perhaps because it seemed to be exactly what the party had in mind when it began promoting Internet use 11 years ago — an educational resource that could help China close its technological gap with the West, encourage innovation and boost economic growth.
But as the Chinese Wikipedia flourished, the authorities apparently came to see it as another threat to the party’s control of information, and an example of an even more worrying development. The Internet has emerged as a venue for people with shared interests — or grievances — to meet, exchange ideas and plan activities without the party’s knowledge or approval.
I know that wikipedia has taken its shots lately. I know it is flawed, and there are those among my readers who would argue that information, in order to be trusted, should come from authority. Which gets at one of the fundamental human conversations, I suppose.
Still, this long Post article on the growth and suppression of the Chinese wikipedia illustrates the power of the idea:
In the beginning, the Chinese edition was heavy with science and technology. The Norwegian mathematician Kirsten Nygaard was added before Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China. But as months passed, people from around the world began to submit articles on a variety of subjects, including wine and cars, history and politics.
In July 2003, a prolific Hong Kong user known online as Lorenzarius sparked one of the site’s first political debates with an essay urging people to avoid “China-centrism.” He argued, for example, that the war that began when Japan invaded China in 1937 should be called the “Second Sino-Japanese War” instead of the “War of Resistance against Japan,” as it is referred to by the party.
Most who responded posted objections, saying that almost all Chinese knew the war by its official name. But they also endorsed his larger point about trying to maintain a neutral point of view in Wikipedia’s entries.
A few months later, another debate erupted over how contributors should resolve disputes on the site. Some advocated a system in which only the most active users could vote, but Sheng argued that all users should be treated equally. Lorenzarius concurred, and urged users to try to compromise and seek consensus before resorting to a vote.
To many educated in China, these governing principles of Wikipedia — objectivity in content, equality among users, the importance of consensus — were relatively new concepts. Yuan said he consulted the work of philosopher John Rawls and economist Friedrich Hayek to better understand how a free community could organize itself and “produce order from chaos.”
“We had heard of these ideas, but they really didn’t have much to do with our lives,” said Yuan, now a computer programmer. “In school, we were taught an official point of view, not a neutral point of view. And we didn’t learn much about how to cooperate with people who had different opinions.”
Read it all.
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