Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-10-31/Community view
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|{{{1|Observations from the mainland}}}|By Yan
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Yan is a resident of the People's Republic of China and an administrator on the Chinese Wikipedia -S
I'm currently in Beijing, finishing a meetup of the Wikimedians of
mainland China with over 50 attendees. I'm not writing as the group's
official representative, but in some ways I may be fairly typical
of an experienced member. As an admin on the Chinese Wikipedia I perform
regular maintenance. I've written
about China's internet backbones, explaining China's censorship
policies and related problems. Other mainland
Chinese Wikimedians are working on articles on local histories and monuments –
something that desperately needs more contributions.
{{Quote|Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.|The Wikimedia Foundation}}
Let me break down the WMF's commitment into two.
Every single human being can freely share?
“Freely sharing" means both "reading" and "writing". Free knowledge
will never be read by its intended audience if we do not distribute
it. We need to take government censorship more seriously and consider how to best react to it.
"Every single human being" includes Chinese mainlanders. Yet the WMF's
policies are more responsible for denying access to China than the
Chinese government is. One example is the "IP block exempt" user flag.
Only with this flag can someone use a
proxy (VPN) to access Wikipedia. Since all language versions of
Wikipedia are blocked in China, proxies are the only way to read or
edit Wikipedia. All mainland Chinese Wikimedians must have this flag,
and it has to be
added by admins on a case-by-case basis. But the WMF removed local
checkuser rights on the Chinese Wikipedia, which has since increased stewards'
workloads on Meta, making the "IP block exempt" problem even worse
for us.
Barring innocent contributors is definitely not what “every single human
being" should mean.
The WMF sued the Turkish government for blocking Wikipedia, but it
hasn't done anything about censorship in China. We pay for our own
VPNs; we pay for our own meetups; but we've received nothing from the WMF's
US$100 million annual budget.
The sum of all knowledge?
There are few mainland China-related articles on Wikipedia. The
contributors are roughly equally divided among
Hongkongers, Taiwanese, and mainlanders. This means with the same
number of editors, mainland contributors cover a geographic area and population
dozens of times larger than those of the other two. The upshot is that
the articles of many large mainland cities are not as detailed as a
town in Taiwan.
A city like Beijing, with about the same population as Australia, has
only one or two dozen active contributors.
There are double standards on notability. A bus line in Hong Kong can
have its own dedicated article, but in the mainland city of
Yuhuan, with a population of 400,000, the single active
contributor is focusing on local articles and has difficulty meeting
notability criteria.
So the WMF's "Imagine a world" statement makes little sense in China.
It sounds like a propaganda slogan to me – something like the American dream or the Chinese dream, or the Communist party propaganda I see on the street.
=Advocacy=
The WMF's advocacy doesn't help. People in communities without
good English-language skills are the ones most likely to be forgotten. We
encyclopedia-writing nerds don't care about those slogans either. We
just want somewhere to contribute real solid content.
What has happened in China contradicts the WMF's slogans. China
allows uncensored information to be accessed by the privileged few,
instead of the masses. The "privileged few" are mostly scholars,
college students, people who received higher education, and
politicians making policies. That's why we’re saying: "Wikipedia has
been blocked in mainland China" instead of "Wikipedia has been banned
in mainland China." There are no laws to explicitly ban Wikipedia and
its activities, though the site itself has been blocked.
But Wikipedia is well-known by those with higher education, and their views
on the site are quite the opposite of how people think of Wikipedia in
the West, where most people treat Wikipedia as a valuable source
academically, instead of trying to stop Wikipedia from academic uses.
Beijing doesn't care if just a few people know about
things like the Tiananmen Square protests.
As ordinary mainland contributors, we care more about preserving the present and past for future generations. Motivations for contributing to Wikipedia are different for different
editors, but this one is important among mainlanders. When the day China regains access
to Wikipedia, we don't want to see there is almost nothing about China when we get there.
=International relations=
China has had a troubled history with some countries, but we
don't care about ancient history. Let's take the current senseless Sino-American trade war. Neither the trade war nor the Communist party’s propaganda make Chinese people hate Americans, though it does make us think that some Americans, especially Donald Trump, are jerks. I don't think there is even a need for increased understanding between Chinese Wikimedians and those from the Western hemisphere, since there is little interference and distrust between us. What genuinely alienates Chinese and Westerners are modern-day political problems, biases developed through media exposure and education (Westerners included), and a post-Cold War residue of ideological disputes. Abandoning such political squabbling and focusing on WMF projects is what we should be doing.
=Diversity=
There are 56 officially recognized ethnic groups in China, with Han
being the largest, at over 90% of the population. Mainland editors
have never surveyed ourselves by ethnicity or gender, but based on
what I personally know, there are Zhuang, Manchu, and
Korean-Chinese editors. Han's percentage is higher than 90%, as
many
ethnic minority groups live in underdeveloped western parts of China,
lacking access to the internet and the awareness required to use Wikipedia.
Political diversity is another question. This is one reason I’m unable
to speak for our user group as a
whole. We
have members who are pro-Beijing and others who are pro-democracy. The
whole group doesn't agree on a single political statement, but
everybody's fine letting me speak for myself.
=Wikimedians of mainland China=
An official Wikimedia User Group China (WUGC) was recognized by the Affiliation Committee in 2014 but stopped accepting new members when the Chinese Wikipedia was blocked by China in May 2015. Their public activities since then have been extremely rare.
Unhappy with the situation, another group of mainland Wikimedians, including me, created a new user group in early 2017, naming ourselves "Wikimedians of Mainland China User Group" (WMCUG). The founding members started the Shanghai bi-weekly meetup, the most frequent
regular meetup in mainland China ever. Most currently active mainland Chinese Wikimedians are already our members or at least pro-WMCUG.
A law came into effect in China in 2017, barring foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the WMF, from carrying out activities in China. How to establish a formal branch of the WMF in China is a large topic we can deal with later. But at this moment, we are the
de-facto user group representing mainland China. Because of the new law, we won't bother getting recognition from the Affiliation Committee for awhile.
For related coverage, see:
As usual, we welcome polite commentary from our readers in the section below. Yan has requested direct questions to him from readers be set aside at the top of the comments section, with the understanding that he may not be able to respond within 24 hours for technical reasons.
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