Taipei, Aug. 3 (CNA) Wikipedia will try to communicate with China on its blockage of the popular reference Web site, as well as the intellectual property rights infringement issue, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in a press conference in Taipei Friday.
Wikipedia is still being blocked -- at least partially -- in China, and China's biggest online search engine Baidu.com has been listing the Wikipedia content, which goes under the free document license, as its own copyrighted material, Wales said on the first day of the annual Wikimania 2007 which runs through Sunday.
Wales said he will visit China in September and meet with high-level government officials there to address the blockage issue, but added that "there is no formal expectation at this point."
He said the Web site will not accept self-censorship in order to be unblocked in China. In an earlier forum, he said Wikipedia will not allow censorship as Yahoo and Google have done.
Wikipedia is a wonderful, neutral educational resource and Chinese users should be allowed to access it, he said.
Unlike most intellectual property rights infringement cases, which can be talked through and resolved with simple phone calls or email exchanges, the Baidu.com case has been "something we've been aware of for a long time and is still ongoing, " said Florence Devouard, chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Although Baidu is a NASDAQ-listed company in the U.S., the foundation "has no plan to do anything more aggressive" at the moment, Wales said.
The three-day Wikimania 2007, which was organized by the Wikimedia Foundation and Academia Sinica's Institute of Information Science, is both a scientific conference and a community event that brings together bloggers and members of various Wikimedia projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports nine free information projects, including Wikipedia -- a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project.