Today in China

Nowadays, censoring the Internet is getting more and more dificult or even impossible. Let me explain this with the example of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free community encyclopedia covering almost any subject you may think about with hundreds of millions of pages… And guess what? It’s not available in China! Being too difficult to control, the Chinese Government decided to shut it off the Internet as seen by Chinese people! Or, is it really unavailable? Before, one could configure his browser to use a proxy (instructions for firefox). But today, the information on the Internet is duplicated in so many different places and services with added values are built on top of websites such as Wikipedia. I will now show you too ways to access Wikipedia in China.

Answers.com
Owned by Answers Corporation (listed on NASDAQ as ANSW), the free advertising-supported website provides answers to anything based on dozens of website and online encyclopedia such as Wikipedia. It clearly identifies the source of each part of the response which makes it easy for the visitor to find the Wikipedia fraction.

Gollum Browser
Gollum Browser is an advanced Ajax Wikipedia Browser. Nothing needs to be installed. Just go to their website, choose the language for the Gollum interface and Wikipedia content and then, start the browser. One of the nice features available of Golum based on the AJAX technology is the auto-complete input of the keaywords you are looking for. It also provides a bookmark management for you to remember interesting wikipedia entries.

So, what is missing then?
Well, I still didn’t find a way to edit the Wikipedia Articles from China… For example, Gollum has a nice edit button in its tool bar but this redirect the user to censored wikipedia.org.

So from now on, when referring to a Wikipedia page, I will also give you alternate ways to find the article…

Links
Wikipedia (Not available in China!)
Answers.com
Gollum Browser