An interesting article about the Chinese bans on Wikipedia:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/17/china.internet.ap/index.html

It seems so weird to me, since in the US you can basically find anything on the internet, despite some censorship. Freedom of speech is a huge debate in China, for fear of discussion of politically banned issues. There is apparently a lot of censorship of the internet access in China and I just found it interesting how much the Chinese government decides whose opinions can be expressed and what is inappropriate to put on the internet. Anyway, the topic is interesting, but if you don't want to read the whole thing (a whole 3 minutes of reading); here is the part I found most interesting:

I was already interested in our discussion on external memory/externalized sources of knowledge. Then I went to my Digital Art class yesterday and exploring this was a huge part of our lecture. It’s funny how classes can overlap like that.

One of the things we talked about that was most interesting to me was the “memory theatre”. Basically (and I’m sure I’m over-simplifying and leaving something out), the memory theatre was the brainchild of Giulio Camillo back in the sixteenth century. The concept is that, a person is standing on a stage, surrounded by seven different columns and rows, which are organized astrologically, based on the planets and their qualities and characteristics. These rows and columns would contain all the known knowledge in the universe.

3) Wikipedia. There’s a lot to say in how it is deconstructing expert culture, since theoretically everyone has equal access in writing and editing no matter what one’s resume is. does this resemble the messages of some progressive models of critical pedagogy, such as paulo freire's work about how education is divided up in teacher-students and students-teachers, with a less hierarchal flow of information? Or is this problematic since so many people use it? Is it spreading false information? Or is its rate of accuracy not too different from other sorts of media, but people fear it? Why do people go on wikipedia so much? simply because it's more accessible? is accessibility more important than accuracy? Because anyone can write what they want, you see the emergence of subjects that usually aren’t taken seriously, from subcultures to pop culture, to the newest technologies, being presented as legitimate topics worth knowing about.