China's Wikipedia watch.

Wikipedia has been a challenge for China and its 100,000 Internet censors. At times, it seems as though the government can't make up its mind: It intermittently blocks and unblocks both the English and Chinese versions of the user-generated encyclopedia.

Even when the Chinese site is available, it can seem so different from the English site that it might have been written by the censors themselves. For example, Mao Zedong, the founder of China's modern Communist state, hardly sounds like the same man in the two versions: The Chinese site makes no mention of the millions of deaths that resulted from his purges and policies in the 1950s and 1960s. Apparently, contributors to the Chinese site are practicing self-censorship, leaving out information--or avoiding topics entirely--that might provoke censors into taking the site down again.