Wikipedia No Longer Banned in China

Almost one year to the day after the Chinese government placed a ban on both the English and Chinese-language versions of online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, both have been lifted.

reported that the Chinese government has lifted the ban on the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia. This decision comes only one month after the government lifted the ban from Wikipedia's English-language version in China. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia said "We don't know what prompted the block and don't know what prompted the unblock." Created in 2001, Wikipedia's Chinese-language site did actually have some information of the Tiananmen Square "incident", as they put it. The information is essentially written to say that some insolent students staged a Democratic protest and were killed; it neglects to mention that the students were un-armed. Wikipedia is not the only company that had to choose between adhering to the censorship placed on their sites by the Chinese government, or risk losing access to the country all together. Reporters Without Borders has also criticized Yahoo! and Google for "yielding to the Chinese government's censorship requests." Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Autmn Davis is a staff writer for Murdok covering ebusiness and technology.