News

China has partially lifted its ban on the open-forum Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, but many users are still being blocked from the Chinese-language version and cannot access controversial articles.

English-language articles on topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 remain inaccessible despite the government relaxing its censorship almost a year after it completely blocked the site.

The changes have raised concerns that China's online censors may have moved to a page-by-page blocking system rather than sweeping site-wide bans.

China Telecom is giving patchy access to the Chinese version (zh.wp) depending on where users try to access the site, while Netcom, the DSL provider for many homes in China, maintains a complete block, says former Columbia University academic Andrew Lih, who lives in Beijing and is researching a book about Wikipedia and online collaboration.

"This shows what many Great Firewall observers know already — blocking is not uniform across the country, and depends on specific municipality and ISP," Mr. Lih wrote on his blog.

"Nevertheless, this is encouraging and will certainly allow many more contributions to Wikipedia from China users."

After Wikipedia was banned in October last year, internet users in mainland China could only access a heavily censored clone put together by Chinese Web portal Baidu, which put a positive spin on events politically sensitive to Beijing.

Meanwhile one of Wikipedia's founders has revealed plans to launch a rival site with more stringent monitoring of posted information.

Larry Sanger, who helped create the site in 2001 and is now one of its fiercest critics, has created his own version, called Citizendium, which will accept submissions from anyone but will have expert editors verify articles which will then be policed by volunteer "constables" who will keep the peace between warring parties, the Daily Mail reported.

Mr. Sanger said he had financial backing from an unidentified foundation for the venture, and the site would soon be open to a small number of invited editors and members of the public. Mr. Sanger told the newspaper the site would be generally available by the end of the year.