HONG KONG: Shi Zhao slides the computer mouse, making rapid-fire clicks and in the space of a minute or so finds about a dozen minor errors to be tweaked on Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

“There’s really nothing to it,” the 33-year-old Beijinger said with a grin after fellow ‘Wikipedians’ at a conference in Hong Kong goaded him into an impromptu demonstration of how he became king of edits on the Chinese-language edition.

Since he discovered Wikipedia four years ago, Shi has become something of a celebrity in the community, having made some 70,000 edits, averaging nearly 50-a day.

Shi’s feat is even greater given that technically, he should not have access to the site. Last October, the Chinese government blocked access to Wikipedia, which has more than five million articles in 229 languages.

In a sense, the fate of the massively popular website is nothing new. The ruling Communist Party routinely denies access to sites it deems subversive and filters internet pages for sensitive words.

But experts believe the block highlights a head-on clash between what Wikipedia stands for — free knowledge created by the people — and the party’s obsessive control over the production and flow of information.

The site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, is outwardly hopeful that this is all just one big misunderstanding.

“Even if you agree that some blogs should be blocked or some kinds of propaganda should be blocked — which I don’t agree with — but even if you do agree with that, it still strikes me that blocking all of Wikipedia is a huge mistake.

“It’s a simple error, or a failure to understand what we’re doing,” he said.

Of course, Wikipedia has entries on subjects like Tibet and Taiwan independence, the banned Falun Gong spiritual group and the bloodily suppressed pro-democracy protests of 1989.

But China experts, internet analysts and, deep down, Wales himself think the block probably runs deeper than an effort to censor a handful of sensitive articles on a largely innocuous online encyclopedia that is the world’s 16th most visited website, according to Alexa Internet, which monitors traffic.—Reuters