Tuesday, October 28, 2008

My call from Beijing is still getting some attention -- internet, wikis, China's Great Wall

We went to China for the Olympics. I did a lot of blogging and data collection there -- but could not put pages onto our wikis. The wikia.com domain was blocked.

Back then I posted a simple message and it is still getting kicked around a bit in high-tech circles.

But the upside of this was that our blogs were visible in China for the first-time ever in August. When we departed the US, I had heard that the blogs were not visible in China. But, by the time we got to China, they were visible. The Olympic hosts had opened up a good bit of the net to those in China.


Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:38:28 +1100
From: Victor ... @gmail.com
Subject: Re: [Wikia-l] We are now in Beijng -- and Olympics about to unfold -- without wikia
To: "Central Wikia Mailing List"

For the Benefit of Anupam.

This is the issue that was raised previously.

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 2:13 AM, Angela ... @gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 12:52 AM, Mark Rauterkus
> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > We can NOT see my wiki from Beijing.
>
> Unfortunately Wikia.com and other Wikia-owned domains have been
> blocked in mainland China for some time. Wikipedia was similarly
> blocked for many years, but recently unblocked for the Olympics along
> with many other sites, though certainly not all. It's something that
> KJ (Wikia's Chinese-language community manager) and Jimmy Wales have
> worked on reversing, though it's really not something we can control.
> We continue to look for solutions for this, but until then, you might
> want to read Wikipedia's advice on this at http://tinyurl.com/675onp
>
> Angela
> _______________________________________________
> Wikia-l mailing list
> Wikia-l@wikia.com
> http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l
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4 comments:

Gregory Kohs said...

You said, "...could not put pages onto our wikis. The wikia.com domain was blocked."

I'm interested in the possessive pronoun you used, our.

Are you an employee of Wikia.com? If not, do you have some form of ad revenue sharing with Wikia, Inc.? If you have no ownership or revenue relationship with Wikia, I'm curious how you've so warmly come to mentally associate that company's wiki farm as being your own. Truly, I'd like to explore this phenomenon more closely, if you are just a "user" of Wikia, it's an incredible paradigm shift for a web property to have its users saying "our" regarding the site.

October 29, 2008 8:47 AM
Mark Rauterkus said...

I run two wikis at wikia.com. One is political and the other is sports.

You are right -- in that I don't own the content nor the ad income. But, I have put in lots of work.

If you want to talk further, we can chat.

October 29, 2008 8:59 AM
Gregory Kohs said...

I guess there's a trade-off between traffic/exposure for your ideas, and keeping revenues/ownership for your efforts.

As an example, I have a wiki site (MyWikiBiz.com) where I invite contributors to control their content in the Directory space, and even plug in THEIR OWN Google AdSense ads, and keep the revenue generated therein, for the rest of their lives.

I honestly thought the site would take off like crazy, but thus far it's just a Google PageRank of 4/10, and only 38,000 pages created.

It truly seems more people are more likely to just give away their labor for free, allowing some capitalist other than themselves keep all the profits of their labor. I just don't get it.

October 29, 2008 4:10 PM
Mark Rauterkus said...

I visited your site this morning, after your first note. It is great. We have plenty to talk about, one day.

I see you are in eastern PA, right?

I didn't find your email address -- or gmail told me it didn't work, weirdly.

October 29, 2008 5:17 PM

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