Thanks Colin for your nice words!
I just uploaded the "rulebook" to Google Spreadsheet at http://goo.gl/zKslcu.
It can be used in whatever way, but do read the paper
(http://<http://goo.gl/RnMvG1>
goo.gl/RnMvG1) first to avoid misinterpretation.
Best,
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:45 PM, Collin Anderson
<col...@averysmallbird.com>wrote:
> Congratulations, this is impressive work. I am also completely jealous --
> a colleague and myself will be releasing a similar report for Iran in the
> next two weeks. This is intended at a broader global project on Wikipedia
> censorship ({{Citation Filtered}}) that I would hope might merge well into
> what you are doing.
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 7:26 PM, 夏楚 <summer.ag...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> To all,
>>
>> I just finished writing up my research on GFW (Great Firewall of China)
>> blacklist for Wikipedia. Some of you might find it interesting.
>>
>> The paper can be found at goo.gl/RnMvG1 (tweeted
>> here<https://twitter.com/SummerAgony/status/384820318402920448>).
>> Here I paste excerpts from the Abstract and Conclusions below.
>>
>> *Abstract*
>>
>> In this report, we detail the *complete* and *exact* rulebook that the
>> Great Firewall of China (GFW) exerts on Wikipedia. We call it "rulebook''
>> (instead of the common term "blacklist'') because we not only identify the
>> blacklisted terms, but also the exact string matching rules deployed by
>> GFW. An efficient probing methodology makes this possible.
>>
>> ...
>> Wikipedia contains millions of pages, e.g. more than 700,000 articles for
>> the Chinese version, and more than 4,240,000 articles for the English
>> version. It seems a daunting and unfeasible task to test these pages
>> exhaustively, hence there has been no well known attempt to gather the
>> complete blacklist.
>>
>> While a small sample of the blacklist is useful, the complete picture
>> can be much more powerful in revealing the underlying works of GFW and
>> its operators. In this study, we devised a methodology which efficiently
>> examines the entire Wikipedia corpus, hence exposing to the world the
>> complete GFW rulebook for Wikipedia the first time. In total, there are 919
>> rules (excluding URL terms) which are applicable to Wikipedia, affecting
>> 5336 pages in Chinese Wikipedia and 67 English Wikipedia pages.
>>
>> The revealed rulebook also demonstrates that the GFW operation is
>> haphazard and ill-maintained. At the same time, Chinese
>> censorship bureaucracy *intends* to be thorough and extensive.
>>
>> To be precise, the findings in this report are on two Wikipedia
>> snapshots: 2013-09-08 for the Chinese version and 2013-09-04 for the
>> English version.
>>
>> *Conclusion Remarks*
>>
>> In this study, we examined the entire Wikipedia corpus (Chinese version
>> and English version) and revealed the complete and exact GFW rulebook for
>> Wikipedia (with caveats described in Section 6).
>>
>> A sample of notable findings are:
>>
>> - There are 78 terms for which GFW blocks a non-standard variant but
>> not the canonical path. These are cases the censors intend to block but
>> the
>> block does not really happen, suggesting the censors have poor
>> understanding of Wikipedia's serving system.
>> - Many obscure non-article pages are blocked, which raises suspicion
>> that these pages were provided to the censorship bureaucrats by Wikipedia
>> editors who are very familiar with the content (e.g. those who
>> participated
>> in the edit wars and/or discussions regarding self-censorship proposals).
>> - GFW string matching rules have a 64-byte hard limit of size.
>>
>> The biggest learning out of this study, in my opinion, is that GFW
>> operation
>> is haphazard and ill-maintained. Also, there are many indications that the
>> GFW operators are somewhat disconnected from the censorship bureaucrats.
>>
>> We hope the revealing can be of interest to internet censorship watchers,
>> Wikipedia researchers, China observers, and ordinary Chinese citizens.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Xia Chu (Twitter: @summer.agony)
>>
>> --
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> *Collin David Anderson*
> averysmallbird.com | @cda | Washington, D.C.
>
> --
> Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations
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--
--
Xia Chu (Twitter: @summer.agony; Google+: gplus.to/summer.agony)
--
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