For all of its faults…Wikipedia refuses to give in to PRC government:

In Hong Kong for three days to speak at the Chinese Wikimania 2006 conference at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Wales said he had no intention of sacrificing the site’s independence or its culture of allowing users to add to and modify its pool of knowledge. He said the site would not take the same decision as Google did in February to accept censorship, as requested by Beijing. Main American websites like Google, Cisco, Yahoo and others, have come under accurate fire several times because they accepted public censorship in order to have access to the Chinese market. Further, they collaborate with the Chinese authorities, preventing users from accessing “unwelcome” sites (about matters like freedom, democracy, Taiwan, and Tiananmen Square) and some even revealed the identity of authors of articles, leading to their arrest and imprisonment.

"One of the things deeply important to me, and to the entire Wikipedia community, is that whatever we do to become accessible in China, must not be viewed as what Google has done in compromising censorship,” said Wales. “It is not acceptable for us to do something to make sure the Chinese government authorises every edition of everything that comes out.”

In this month’s Atlantic Monthly, there’s an interesting article about the invention and development of Wikipedia.