After being blocked for a year, Wikipedia is once again accessible from mainland China. For those of us who use it regularly, this is a big relief as we can now say goodbye to the annoyingly slow proxy services that we had to use to get around the block. The question now is, how long will it stay accessible?

Back again...for now.

Via China media blog Danwei, this story from Editor and Publisher provides more information:

[The blog] Flumesday noted that the 2004 block was rumored to have come in response to an article posted on the site as the country approached the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

"There has been much speculation over the cause of the block," writes Wikipedia. "Possible reasons offered include controversial articles in Wikipedia itself and recent controversial events in the news that Wikipedia has covered, though as of now none of these are confirmed."

Well, speculation is often all you get when it comes to analyzing Chinese Government censorship decisions. But it doesn't take much of a troll through Wikipedia to find a great deal of content that the Chinese Government would find objectionable. And as Wikipedia itself notes, this is the third time the site has been blocked. I'd lay down good money that the site will find itself on the wrong side of the great firewall again at some point, likely when yet another sensitive date is approaching, or when some event makes the Government sensitive. The Chinese Government is not known for its love of departure from political orthodoxy.

However, it may also be that the Government has increasing faith in the sophistication of the Great Firewall. As a commenter on Danwei notes--and I have confirmed--searching for sensitive topics, like the dreaded FLG, triggers a reset from Chinese routers and temporary lockout, much like what happens to Google when you search for forbidden topics. If you can surgically remove what you don't like, why nuke the entire site, with all the attendant PR problems?

That raises the question of BBC News, which is one of the last major global Web sites completely blocked by the Great Firewall (not counting human rights NGO sites and FLG, which remain beyond the pale). In an age of hundreds of Internet news sources, widespread syndication and proxy servers, censorship of any one site seems futile. But censorship in China has always been as much about politics, diplomacy and relationships as it has been about naked control of content. This is increasingly true as the Great Firewall's scalpel becomes ever finer. What must BBC have done to remain in the wilderness to this day?*

At any rate, I'm happy to have Wikipedia back. Yes, there were content scraping and mirror sites that were more easily accessible, not to mention China's own Baidupedia, but it's still nice to be able to use Wikipedia directly again.

Speaking of Google...
On a similar note, some people in China have been wondering what the implications of Google's purchase of YouTube might be here. David Wolf has done a good job of analyzing that situation at his Silicon Hutong blog. Many of us in China are surprised that YouTube has remained unblocked as long as it has, given some of the politically provocative content it hosts. I've previously wondered aloud as to its future fortunes in China. Video remains much harder to selectively filter--or search for that matter--than text.

Time will tell. Watch this space.

* A possible answer to that rhetorical question may be found here, via the Peking Duck.