Wikipedia ban

    From Consumerium development wiki R&D Wiki

    There are many good reasons for a Wikipedia ban. For one thing, Wikinfo is actually better in every way than Wikipedia. It has all the same content minus most of the biased stupidity. There is less ad hominem delete and other sysop vandalism.

    When China banned Wikipedia, however, the usual happy NPOV talk was invoked:

    Last week, for about 48 hours, Wikipedia.com, a multilingual online open-content encyclopedia, was inaccessible to users throughout China. On June 17, around 6:30PM Beijing time, the site opened up to users in China.

    Though it is still unclear why the site was blocked, the ban does come on the heels of a new circular issued by the Chinese government asking for Internet Service Providers to show patriotism and refrain from "inappropriate material", which includes contentious political and social commentary.

    James Wales, in an interview with ChinaTechNews.com, claimed "By policy, Wikipedia is not a political site in any way. We are a general reference encyclopedia with a strong neutrality policy. Articles are carefully researched and reviewed by Chinese people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, as well as mainland China. Therefore, Wikipedia is an excellent test case. When Wikipedia is blocked, it can not be claimed that only lies or propaganda are blocked, because we are neither. When we are blocked, it is information itself that is being blocked."

    The new government circular issued last week recommends that Internet Service Providers only allow "wholesome online information" and news that conforms to "fairness and trustworthiness". Apparently Wikipedia doesn't conform.

    Wales says, "By policy, representatives of the Chinese government would be welcome to edit our articles in conformance with our [Wikipedia] neutrality policy." He said nothing about how to deal with an influx of millions of such funded trolls. But most telling was this comment by Wales:

    "It is one thing to block gambling sites, or pornography, or political opinions, but it is another thing altogether to admit that it is information itself that is the enemy. I doubt if they will continue that. Probably some administrator will be reprimanded." So, according to Wales, political opinions are like pornography or gambling, and only his own methods lead to fairness or trustworthiness. This is literally self-worship, unsurprising in a GodKing.

    "Wikipedia's founders hope that by 2025, Wikipedia will be a standard reference work used by children and adults all over China, in both paper and electronic editions." This is of course naive. Whatever happens to the GFDL corpus by then, it will require other GFDL corpus access providers to be running things, as Wikimedia will be destroyed by its own stupid self-worshipping ideology.