Wikipedia Finally Available in China?

Oh my god! I just read on Richard’s blog at expreference.com (Oct. 30, 2006) that Wikipedia is available from the mainlaind! This is really the best news. My life without Wikipedia has been seriously lacking. When I first arrived and I was having troubles getting to Google, Gmail, and Wikipedia I thought I would die, and I was certain that I couldn’t live here for long. But wonders of wonders we can now access Wikipedia in all it’s wiki glory. Wow! Well, maybe not. Some reports say that it’s only a partial unblock, but I’m still grateful.

Of course, Wikipedia has the fully annotated story about the miracle of access from the mainland:

Beginning from October 10, 2006, conflicting reports came in from different parts of China about a possible lifting of the block. The first report of a change was by a blogger in Liuzhou, Guangxi, who posted his finding to an online forum at about 6 pm on October 10, 2006, Beijing Time. However, access appears to differ depending on location and internet service provider as a result of more fine-grained blocking. [...] Posters to the Slashdot online forum who stated that they were in Beijing further noted that while they could access the English language version of the article on Tiananmen Square, which includes a brief description of the 1989 protests, the article Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 remained blocked. There was a similar report that the article democracy is available on English Wikipedia, while Falun Gong is unavailable. In contrast, Reporters Without Borders stated on 12 October that English Wikipedia appeared entirely unblocked, including the article on the 1989 protests, but that the Chinese language version was unaccessible for most Chinese. The advocacy organization criticized the government shift as meant “to appease its critics abroad while continuing to censor the information available to its own population,” while congratulating “those in charge of Wikipedia, especially Jimmy Wales”. Wikipedia users state that other language editions, including German, Japanese, and Korean are available at this time.

Yes, it’s crazy that it took almost a month before I finally heard about this. Check out Andrew Lih’s blog on the topic.

Speaking of limited internet access, however, I still seem to have a limit on the number of google searches I’m allowed. It just shuts down on me (“host not found”) after a dozen or so searches. Also, I was having problems accessing blogs hosted on blogger.com/blogspot.com recently. Anyone else notice this?