Yesterday, it was reported that Wikipedia was now available in China. This is impressive news, but is not the full story. The English version of Wikipedia is mostly available (it depends on , but the Chinese version is not (http://zh.wikipedia.org/). I learned this from Isaac Mao, the first Chinese blogger, a VC, an organizer for the Chinese Blogger Con, and the liaison for the Chinese Wikipedia.
I met Isaac Mao this summer when I was in China. Accessing the internet in China was both easy and difficult. There was an internet cafe in every town I went to; needless to say this was very convenient. Many hotels also had computers. The difficulty came in getting access to the computer in the first place and then trying to access the data i needed. To access a computer in an internet cafe I always had to provide my passport number, in some cases I had to sign a scary contract. Once I was able to access the internet it was tough to know what would work. I could never get to any version of the Wikipedia or the google cache (my attempt to get around the WP restriction). Luckily, there are a ton of other sites that contained the type of tourist information I was looking for. This is a great step forward for tourists, expats, and English-speaking natives, but there appears to be a long way to go.