Why China Blocked Wikipedia by Stephen Harrison

Why China Blocked Wikipedia in All Languages

By Stephen Harrison

The Chinese government has long been suspicious of Wikipedia. It’s been blocked in China intermittently since 2004, and the Chinese-language version has been blocked since June 2015. Now the government has gone even further. The Wikimedia Foundation released a statement on Friday announcing that it had determined that China blocked all versions of Wikipedia.

Reuters and PC Mag noted that the timing of the block seems to coincide with the Tiananmen Square protests, which ended violently on June 4, 1989. When Wikipedia’s official account tweeted that the reasons for the total block were “unknown to us,” a Shanghai-based user responded, “Don’t be daft.”

>> Continue reading the rest of the article at Slate

Source Notes is a Future Tense column about the internet's knowledge ecosystem.