Chinese e-pedia e-Wiki shuts down

The Chinese online encyclopedia e-Wiki, closely modeled on Wikipedia, has shut itself down under heavy pressure from the Chinese government, Reporters Without Borders reports.

"We all aspire to freedom, but we live in the embrace of the motherland so we have to be subjected to relevant restraints and cannot cause trouble for others," a notice on the site said. "e-Wiki has temporarily shut down and we apologize for the inconvenience."

Radio Free Asia reported on 4 August that e-Wiki stopped functioning at the end of July, a few weeks after posting an article about Lung describing him as a politician close to the Falun Gong spiritual movement and outspoken in his criticism of the Communist Party of China. Another recently-posted article referred to the Taiwanese authorities as the “government of the Republic of China” and said they were not ready to give up their sovereignty and autonomy as regards mainland China.

Reporters Without Borders ranks China near the very bottom of its list for press freedom. “It is regrettable that government threats forced e-Wiki’s editor to censor himself,” RSF said. “We understand that he felt in danger in the current context, as the authorities have significantly stepped up their control over online publications, and many sites have been closed down by force in recent weeks.”

Wikipedia has been blocked since October 2005. The commercial Internet company Baidu has a censored version called Baidupedia. And there's always google.cn for censored web searching.