Chinese censorship

The classical Chinese words of Wikipedia

Wikimania was heavily covered in the international press this week (see "In brief", below). One major story that came out of the conference was Jimmy Wales’ statements that he would prefer to have Wikipedia banned entirely in mainland China than censored as it is currently.

Wales was interviewed by the The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog (and later covered in the same paper's China Realtime Report blog) during Wikimania. The comments came about during a discussion on access to the secure version of Wikimedia projects—in China, the uncensored, encrypted version of Wikipedia is blocked completely by the Great Firewall, but the unencrypted version is available with keyword filtering.

The Chinese government's censorship and occasional banning of Wikipedia has meant that Wikipedia is not the dominant online encyclopedia on the mainland; rather, competitors like Baidu Baike and Hudong predominate. Though activists have asked Wikipedia to make the encrypted version the default version of the site, to force Beijing's hand, Wales and the Foundation say that this is not currently technically feasible. Also stating that he opposed any efforts by the Chinese government to force editors to register under real names, Wales concluded that "We don’t approve of filtering, but there is nothing we can do to stop it."

In brief

Jimmy Wales's plenary: Covered in this week's Signpost special report, various parts of Wales' speech were covered by several media outlets, including CNN (Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales calls for new model of journalism), the Wall Street Journal's Digits blog (Wikipedia Co-Founder Urges Vigilant Journalism), and the South China Morning Post (Wikiwonks soak up their guru's grand vision at Hong Kong conference).

Wikipedia fails to bridge gender gap: The South China Morning Post covered progress on the gender gap problem in recent years. DNA India also published an article by Netha Hussein on the gender gap.

US cybersurveillance plans will spark legal challenges: Wikipedia pioneer: Wales also discussed cybersecurity and censorship in the context of the United States and Edward Snowden's recent revelations of the extent of American spying programs, in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

Despite blocks, Wikipedia strives for free knowledge in China: SmartPlanet covered Wikimania in the context of censorship on mainland China, and what many perceive as less filtering in recent years.

Listen to Wikipedia: TechHive ('Listen to Wikipedia turns heated edit wars into soothing music), TechTree ('Listen To Wikipedia' Turns Edits to Music), Time (Like a Nerdy Wind Chime: Real-Time Wikipedia Edits Set to Music), The Verge (Fall asleep to the sound of Wikipedia), msnNOW (The sounds of Wikipedia are far more pleasant than you'd think), PSFK (Wikipedia Edits Transformed Into a Symphony of Sounds), GeekSmash (What Does Wikipedia Sound Like?), and CNet (Surrender to the soothing sounds of Wikipedia) covered Listen to Wikipedia, a project that turns Special:RecentChanges into music.

ROM gathers 'e-volunteers for a Wikipedia edit-a-thon Friday: The Toronto Star covered an upcoming editathon at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Wikipedia's Wales calls Ed Snowden an "American hero": The Wall Street Journal published a video interview with Wales where he discussed Snowden. The interview was also covered in SlashGear and CNN.

Kiwix downloads Wikipedia to your PC, Mac, or Android for offline access: LifeHacker covered Kiwix's abilities. An article also appeared on Ghacks.

Feminists launch model for online learning: Women's eNews published an article on a new DOCC (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) that will include a Wikipedia component aimed at reducing the gender gap and systemic bias.

In this issue

14 August 2013 (all comments)

News and notes

In the media

Discuss this story

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Re:Wikipedia fails to bridge gender gap

Obviously we're not even close to where we would like to be, but if the 21% female number of Wikimania attendees [1] reflects the current editing population, this is significant progress from the 9% figure from 2011. --LukeSurl^{t c} 11:01, 16 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The problem I have is that there's a lot of talk about the gender gap problem - but almost no attempts to propose solutions that I've seen. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 11:37, 16 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sadly, there's not much we can actually do. What little we could, we've mostly done (and if you know what else we can do, please let us & WMF know). The problem is society-wide (ex. consider the percent of women in a tertiary level CS class), and until we can successfully convince people that being interested in computers is an acceptable pastime/career choice for women, the situation will look as dire as it is now.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 18:03, 16 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are various things that are being worked on. The biggest is the visual editor, the theory being that our current editor makes editing a daunting experience for nonprogrammers, and programming is a largely male profession. I understand that our current editing community has a strong skew towards programmers so this theory has some credibility. We have various chapter initiatives to tackle the gender balance, including offering training sessions to groups of potential editors where there are likely to be a higher proportion of women, and creating articles on notable women who've not yet been covered. There are also some longstanding bugzilla requests to reduce the number of edit conflicts, this would be useful in its own right but there is a theory that new male editors might see an edit conflict as a challenge to be dealt with as opposed to a rejection. However I wouldn't take too much comfort from the 21% female attendance at Wikimania, I'm pretty sure that is at least partially due to staff having a higher proportion of women than volunteers, which is only to be expected, especially for staff positions recruited from outside the community. Ϣere SpielChequers 03:22, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are lots of ideas waiting for someone to act on them at meta:Proposals for more female editors. 98.220.58.72 (talk) 03:28, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No, LukeSurl. The people who attend Wikimania are highly unrepresentative of Wikipedians, in many ways. Over representation of women at real life gatherings as opposed to their rate of participation online is a common phenomenon for web communities.

As far as I can tell, there has been no change in the gender composition of editors for quite a while. Yesterday, of 2730 editors with a known gender, 2564 were male (94%) [2]. Which is about what it has been for the last few years, IIRC. Xrt6L (talk) 04:22, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So according to WereSpielChequers, women are unable to use the traditional Wikipedia source editor because they are by nature nonprogrammers; they also need extra training and are frightened by edit conflicts. Just as well that all these problems are well on the way of being solved. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 07:39, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
In fairness, a lot of the men at Wikimania 2013 were paid to be there too (either by virtue of being on the WMF payroll, a Chapter payroll, or on a WMF scholarship to attend) such that I don't believe Wikimania attendance is uncorrelated with the volunteer content contributing community on just the gender front.--Brian Dell (talk) 08:22, 20 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Chinese Wikipedia editor Huang Zhisong barred from leaving the country

After Jimmy Wales makes a stand against China, Wikipedia’s Chinese editor banned from leaving country --Andreas JN 466 14:43, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]