Well, I'm back.
Ephemeral: You know that Doctor Who S3 episode "Blink"? The one where people keep getting pulled back in time and cross paths with a stranded Doctor, and have to live their way back towards the latter days from which they were pulled?
Yeah... you get the idea.

This article on the Chinese Wikipedia in the International Herald Tribune caught my eye.

Just who was Mao Zedong?

According to the English-language version of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, he was a victorious military and political leader who founded China's modern Communist state. He was also a man many saw as "a mass murderer, holding his leadership accountable for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent Chinese."

Switch to Wikipedia in Chinese, and one discovers a very different man. There, Mao Zedong's reputation is unsullied by any mention of a death toll in the great purges of the 1950s and 1960s, or for what many historians call the greatest famine in human history.

Andrew Lih comments here on a blow-by-blow comparison done by New York Times correspondent Howard French. For that, make no mistake about it, is what this is: an information war. Fought not with bullets but with electrons, granting history not to the physical victors but those who operate the Wikipedia server that your browser goes to by default, the Chinese Wikipedia stakes a claim for the 99% of Chinese users who don't bother to tunnel out from behind the Great Firewall using a proxy.

On 10 Jun 2006, I brought up a photo of Tank Man in the heart of Beijing, courtesy of English Wikipedia and the timely assistance of taiji_jian and his desktop Linux box. What did this accomplish, other than the thrill of the illicit? Well, to hear tell of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' first attempts to get a foothold in China, it was really an all-or-nothing proposition. The whole (English) site, as some of you may know, is domain-level IP-blocked in China. The People's Republic of China (PRC) wanted Wales to voluntarily self-censor about 1% of Wikipedia's content, as Yahoo and Microsoft (and to a lesser, albeit more notorious extent, Google) already do. Wales said "nothing doing", and so the status quo of the Golden Shield (jing₁ dun₁, the PRC's propagandistic euphemism for Internet censorship) stayed in place. Replace "Shield" with "Curtain" and you get the idea.

Fast-forward ahead a few months: there is now a growing awareness of the dichotomy between the Chinese and English Wikipedias. Is it censorship? A Potemkin village kind of syndrome? Yes and yes, but only for that pesky 1%. You see, there are just a few articles, such as those concerning dissidents such as Wang Dan and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, that are touchy for the PRC. 1% of the content for 1% of the readership - the proxy users - doesn't pose an issue. The PRC government knows that there are people who tunnel out of curiosity or just to buck the trends. They know that there are closet dissidents who tunnel, and you can be sure that the subversives they view as more dangerous than the casual college student wanting a taste of free information are surveilled. If, however, the readership expanded to, say, 10%, it might be a problem. You see, the PRC pulls down news articles about every would-be coup - every strike against a state-run facility, from an aircraft factory to a provincial university. The government knows that the information has been seen by that 1% already; it doesn't mind that it circulates within the infosphere of people who have self-selected out of the complacent infoproletariat. It is what happens to the 99% that the PRC government cares about, because when the information that it is possible to overthrow the state becomes common, then the state will be overthrown.

Napoleon Bonaparte said: "The art of the police is not to see what it is useless that it should see." That, too, is the art of the modern Chinese internet user... for the moment. Happily, we are reminded that Albert Einstein said: "Politics is for the moment; an equation is for eternity." The equation we are looking at is perhaps a limit theorem, counting the days to a convergence that cannot be willed, or edited, away.

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Banazir

( The Wikipedia Birth Date Meme )
( The Drabble Meme )

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Banazir

Seen in wikipedians and cross-posted from teunc:

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

Here are some that I got, that took about half an hour:

Distance 3: The Rock to Melinda French
Distance 4: Bayesian networks to Iraq, Gilgamesh to Valen, Brainiac 5 to Strawberry Shortcake, Anakin Skywalker to Draconity, Benito Mussolini to Yaddle
Distance 5: Edward the Black Prince to John Atanasoff, Cowboy Bebop to Relational Databases, Austin Powers to Relational Databases
Distance 6: Mohammed to Care bears (a spelling cheat), Dr. Evil to Relational Databases (fair and square)
Distance 7: Dragan Mikerevic to Care bears (another spelling cheat)

Edit, 14:15 CST Mon 16 Jan 2005 - Belated happy birthdays to jadeleopard and trilobyte!

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Banazir

It is a testament to MediaWikis and the Wikipedia movement that I was able to find the original pastede on reference (from this comment by shinigami_co in the JournalFen community fandom_wank¹) within just a couple of minutes.

In other news: jereeza IMed me this morning with the sad news that kielle/_redpanda_, founder of the metaquotes community, died yesterday. I didn't know _redpanda_ at all, but of course I had heard of metaquotes, which serves as an LJ quote repository (cf. alt.humor.best-of-usenet only not limited to humor alone). From _redpanda_'s user info page I gleaned a Chinese translation of MY HED IZ PASTEDE ON YEY, which she helped to popularize:

Wo de tow bei jan shan la, tai how la!

(This should probably be wo₃ de₄ tou₂ shi₄ zhan₁ shang₄ de₄, tai₄ hao₃ le₄! but as the version she posted is spelled analogously to PASTEDE, it only adds to the funniness.)

R.I.P. You can see from the tremendous outpouring of sympathy and grief how well-liked she was.

¹ While I'm on the subject of blogging services based on the LJ code, I may as well mention that sui_degeneris has pointed out that I tend to use <lj user=...> and <lj comm=...> to link to users and communities on external blogging services, which leads to "Page Not Found" errors or misdirections when clicked upon. I'd always figured that putting "on {GreatestJournal | DeadJournal | JournalFen | etc.}" would preclude the dread 404, but gondhir and sui_degeneris reminded me that (a) the link is still wrong even if I point it out; (b) people can't be bothered to read any more than I can be bothered to cut and paste a link. The upshot of all this is that:

1. I've decided to use URLs or plain text in such instances for the time being.
2. I would really like to know if there is any cross-service tag that people have proposed - e.g., <xlj comm=...> for LiveJournal, <xgj comm=...> for GreatestJournal, <xdj comm=...> for DeadJournal, <xjj comm=...> for JournalFen, <xbj comm=...> for Blogger, <xmj comm=...> for Moveable Type, etc. Has anyone proposed such a thing, and if so, how did The Powers That Be respond?

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Banazir

narvi pointed out to me that The WikiMedia Foundation is doing a 3^rd Quarter 2005 fund drive in order to raise $200000 for Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.
Edit, 11:45 CST Thu 08 Sep 2005: Looks as if they made it. As of 10:50 UTC 2005-09-08, they've raised $227,860.

( Athrabeth Narvi a Banazir: a discussion on merits, flaws, risks, and benefits of Wikipedia )
( Media Wiki and the planned Graphical Models Wiki )
( On Memory Alpha and Star Wars Wiki )

In other news: The hearing in the Microsoft-KFL-Google case began in King County Superior Court today and is expected to conclude tomorrow. The court filings appear in a Seattle Times supplement and details of today's proceedings are here.

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Banazir