China has unblocked Wikipedia. Wikipedia refused to censor itself to appease totalitarian Beijing, but China unblocked it anyway. China needs Wikipedia and Chinese net-users would access it using circumvention tools — the block on Wikipedia made Chinese Wikipedia users into automatic dissidents.
If only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo had the same courage as Wikipedia, the same confidence that their search-engines were valuable enough to be indispensible.
Wikipedia reported on its site that it had received word from multiple users in the country on Chinese-forums.com that the site had been restored. The most recent blocking was the third such outage reported by Wikipedia.
(Thanks, Coop!)
Update: John Mark sez, "Reports on Slashdot from folks in China indicate that, while Wikipedia
is currently not being blocked in its entirety, certain parts are
still being blocked. Readers in China report having problems getting
to the Chinese language version, and English-language articles on
certain subjects, such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989."
That's predictable enough — but it means that Beijing is now stuck playing cat-and-mouse with Wikipedia, having to ferret out every potentially sensitive page and update its filters accordingly. If MSFT, Yahoo and Google followed Wikipedia's lead, we could force Beijing to devote ever-escalating resources to this effort, a denial-of-service attack on its censors.
