Chinese cut off from Wikipedia
Change reported only a week after access returned
One week after gaining unfettered access to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Chinese Internet users have been cut off from the service again.
Andrew Lih, a former journalism professor at Hong Kong University who tracks censorship in China, wrote on his blog Thursday night that people throughout the country are unable to contact Wikipedia. The report was confirmed by Rebecca MacKinnon, former Beijing bureau chief at CNN and a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. MacKinnon said that a number of Chinese friends wrote to her complaining about the shutdown.
In October 2005, Chinese Internet users lost access to the English and Chinese versions of Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that allows any of its users to write or modify articles on any topic.
China has demanded that American Internet companies doing business in China censor certain politically controversial information.
Firms like Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., and Yahoo Inc. have been denounced by politicians and human rights groups for complying with China's demands, and running online search services that exclude sensitive topics, like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. But Wikipedia, run by a non profit foundation, refuses to censor its contents.
Last month, Chinese authorities reopened access to the English version, and last week, the Chinese Wikipedia was unblocked. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales hailed the unblocking as evidence that the Chinese government might be rethinking its strict censorship policies.
MacKinnon said Chinese decisions to block or unblock particular sites are impossible to understand, because the Chinese government has no clear-cut guidelines about what materials it considers inappropriate and denies that it censors the Internet at all.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com. 
