War on Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia proves the best censorship circumvention is simplicity

One of the ironies of intellectual property law is that it was meant to spur more creative output, but today is often used as a cudgel in the service of censorship. Yet one of the most widely used sources of knowledge (however flawed) is Wikipedia, made up of content licensed under the Creative Commons—meaning anyone can take it and repurpose it with proper attribution for non-commercial purposes.

So despite governments’ best efforts, this kind of content is extremely difficult to block for those who really want to read it. This is probably good news for people in the UK, where it looks like the Online Safety Bill could inadvertently lead to the blocking of the eighth most visited website in the country:

Wikipedia will not comply with any age checks required under the Online Safety Bill, its foundation says.

Rebecca MacKinnon, of the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the website, says it would "violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors".

A senior figure in Wikimedia UK fears the site could be blocked as a result.

But the government says only services posing the highest risk to children will need age verification.
–Wikipedia will not perform Online Safety Bill age checks | BBC News

British lawmakers may find a solution to this to avoid the ignominious status of being in the same company as countries like China, Iran and, for a time, Turkey. Russia, too, has gone through bouts of Wikipedia censorship, although it has recently backed off from completely blocking the site:

Russia is "not yet" planning to block Wikipedia, its minister of digital affairs said on Tuesday as a Moscow court handed the online encyclopaedia another fine for failing to remove content Russia deems illegal.

Wikipedia is one of the few surviving independent sources of information in Russian since a state crackdown on online content intensified after Moscow sent its armed forces into Ukraine.

"We are not blocking Wikipedia yet, there are no such plans for now," Interfax news agency quoted digital affairs minister Maksut Shadaev as saying.

Wikipedia said in an emailed statement it would "continue to provide access to Wikipedia for Russian speakers around the world who find value in the site and endeavor to protect everyone's right to access".
–Russia not planning Wikipedia block for now, minister says | Reuters

A platform like Wikipedia represents a tough problem for an authoritarian regime like the Kremlin. Unlike China, Russia does not have its own robust alternatives to many popular Western platforms, Wikipedia included.

Beijing can block Wikipedia because it adds almost no friction to how people in China use the internet. Most people primarily rely on domestic services already, with the local alternative to Wikipedia being the sanitized Baidu Baike. But in Russia, many people are used to using foreign platforms.

And thanks to the Creative Commons, we can have apps like Kiwix, an offline content browser that allows people to download a whole host of scraped webpages. This includes full-text backups of Wikipedia in different languages. The English archive without any photos comes in at nearly 50GB, and is twice as large if you want the pictures. But at least it's an option.

Versions in other languages are typically smaller, but clearly contain plenty of information.

• Russian Wikipedia archive (magnet link) from March with photos – 33.4GB
• Chinese Wikipedia archive (magnet link) from March with photos – 22.6GB
• Turkish Wikipedia archive (magnet link) from April with photos – 6.3GB

A year ago, Kiwix said that Russian downloads accounted for 42% of all traffic from its servers as people raced to download content before it was blocked.

According to Stephane Coillet-Matillon, who leads Kiwix, the organization that facilitates these downloads, Russian downloads now constitute 42 percent of all traffic on Kiwix servers, up from just 2 percent in 2021. “We had something similar back in 2017 when Turkey blocked Wikipedia,” he said, “but this one is just another dimension.”
–Russians are racing to download Wikipedia before it gets banned | Slate

Wikipedia is, of course, far from a perfect source of knowledge. Philosopher Karen Frost-Arnold has studied the epistemic challenges of Wikipedia. As she explains in her latest book Who Should We Be Online? A Social Epistemology for the Internet:

We cannot understand Wikipedia’s biases without acknowledging that its editors are (at least) 84% men and predominantly white. The gaps in Wikipedia’s online encyclopedia are directly related to who feels welcome in the Wikipedian community, whose knowledge is taken as authoritative, which sources are granted credibility, and whose ignorance is supported and maintained. All of these features are structured by hierarchies of gender, race, and other forms of domination.

But Frost-Arnold also acknowledges that Wikipedia has been found to be a surprisingly accurate source of information given that it is basically a volunteer project that anyone can edit.

Students were told for years not to trust Wikipedia and that it would be more reliable to use Google to search for sources; however, it now appears that Wikipedia with its gatekeeping methods may be less vulnerable to manipulation by fakers than Google’s algorithm. So it may be that the advice given to students has raised a cohort that is more vulnerable to fake news than would be the case with different media literacy education.

So downloading static images of Wikipedia, even though only a snapshot in time, can provide many people access to certain kinds of information that they would not otherwise be exposed to. This is what Frost-Arnold refers to as a “powerful” source of information. In a 2018 essay on Wikipedia, she explains:

We want an encyclopedia to help its users to know many truths, as well as avoid errors. And an encyclopedia that helps users attain more true beliefs than its competitor would have an epistemic advantage, along one dimension. On this score, Wikipedia is incredibly epistemically successful. Encyclopedia Britannica announced it was ending print production in 2012; at the time, Britannica had 65,000 articles compared to Wikipedia’s 3,890,000, almost sixty times as many.

So despite constantly grappling with Wikipedia wars, where different factions try to grab control of the narrative, the world’s largest free source of information can serve as a counter-narrative antidote to misinformation spread in repressive regimes.

Kiwix was not originally meant as a tool for fighting censorship, though. Its target demographic seems to be largely people in developing economies, noting that it aims to make “knowledge available to people with no or limited internet access”.

Still, Kiwix’s use in Russia and elsewhere underscores a simple truth about defeating censorship: The best methods are easy to use and widely accessible. Sharing files is still more intuitive than many more technologically advanced tools.

Amid all the talk from Web3 evangelists who believe decentralized technologies will deliver us from censorship, it is easy to forget that the most common forms of censorship avoidance online are much older technologies, some of which predate Web 2.0.

In other news…

A note on the metaverse

Speaking of modern technologies enabling shared online spaces, China has a very different idea of what the metaverse should be compared with many other parts of the world. Yaling Jiang detailed last week in a Wired article how China’s metaverse is less about fun and more about economic growth.

Chinese startups and tech investors are notoriously trend-driven, and many jumped on the metaverse bandwagon after Meta’s supposed pivot, trying to launch homegrown versions or to integrate virtual or mixed reality elements into consumer products. But the Chinese government, which exerts an enormous influence over the country’s tech sector, was also quick to get in on the metaverse, backing technologies it sees as strategic and setting rules to govern what can go on in this next iteration of cyberspace. That means that what’s emerging in China is very different from the metaverses envisioned in the West. While the metaverses proposed by Meta, Microsoft, and Decentraland are aimed at consumers, China’s virtual worlds are more about putting tech to work in supporting the economy.

“The Metaverse is a vague concept and every [company] is interpreting it in its own way,” says Brady Wang, an associate director at tech market research firm Counterpoint. “In China, it’s very much a government-led concept.”
–China’s Metaverse Is All About Work | WIRED

This is not surprising to anyone who has been paying attention. The Chinese government has for years been pushing its idea of “cyber sovereignty” as a way to sanitize virtual spaces the way it has physical spaces. Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist known for his essays on the metaverse, even mentioned this bifurcation in his book The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything:

China’s “Metaverse” will be even more different from (and centrally controlled compared to) that of Western nations. It may arrive much earlier and be more interoperable/standardized, too.

While less of a concern compared with things like semiconductor supply chains, Beijing’s moves in cyberspace have long been part of the conversation around technological decoupling.

There is a lot to say about how virtual spaces inside and outside China are fracturing in ways that are increasingly difficult to patch up. For this week, we will leave you with Yaling’s article and your own thoughts about what kind of metaverse you want to live in someday.

A note on chess

China has its first grandmaster. This is generally not a newsletter about sports or games, but it is about international exchange—and sports have traditionally been a great vehicle for this.

On April 30, Ding Liren became the first person from China to win the World Chess Championship with a win over Ian Nepomniachtchi, from Russia. Western chess is not widely played in China, but that did not stop the country from celebrating.

Ding’s victory sent waves through Chinese social media late in the evening, with a hashtag related to the new champion quickly amassing over 10 million views on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform. Chinese users, full of pride and relief after three anxiety-filled weeks, celebrated the championship even as some admitted to their ignorance of how to play chess. Nearly all agreed on the weight of the moment.

“We Chinese have stepped atop chess’s highest stage,” one commenter wrote. “Ding Liren is the pride of China.”
–Ding Liren of China Wins World Chess Championship | The New York Times

Ding’s win is being attributed by some to the fact that the former grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, from Norway, apparently got bored and quit last year after dominating the game for a decade. But this may have contributed to a more interesting game:

In a podcast on April 28 on NRK, the largest media company in Norway, Carlsen said: “There is a lot of talk now this world championship proves that ‘classical chess is doing well’ and all that. I have to admit that I don’t buy that at all.”

He explained that Nepomniachtchi and Ding took many chances in the beginning phases of the games in their championship match, but that was atypical. In his matches, Carlsen said, that did not happen because his opponents were afraid of him and tried to limit risk. The result, he argued, was that the games were not interesting.
–Ding Liren of China Wins World Chess Championship | The New York Times

More risk-taking certainly sounds like a more interesting viewing experience. Some chess aficionados seem to agree. Consider this from Mike Mills:

Ding’s got a different style of play and to bring it to the top stage and play probably one of the most drama filled events I’ve seen where players were both playing games that made me want to get at the board despite my recent performances being terrible.

That’s what I want out of a champion. Inspiration and this match has been a month of spectacle that’s had me more engaged in this story than any other for a long time. Congratulations Ding.
–A new world champion | The intersection of disparate interests

Hikaru Nakamura, an American who won the championship five times, reportedly said whoever wins the championship “is not going to be treated as a world champion” because of the circumstances of the win, although he noted either player would be deserving of winning the match.

Maybe some longtime chess players will not get over the fact that Carlsen left before he could be pushed out by losing a championship, but chess is hardly the only game where this happens. Players move on, the game evolves. And ultimately, that is good for the game.

There is always something refreshing about seeing people from different backgrounds come together to share the same passion—even when competing fervently. And for a moment, people can rise above the political fray and learn something new through sporting competition, whether it’s hockey, table tennis or chess.

References

Frost-Arnold, Karen. 2023. Who Should We Be Online? A Social Epistemology for the Internet. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Frost-Arnold, Karen. 2018. “Wikipedia.” In The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology. Routledge.

Ball, Matthew. 2022. The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company.