[etaerc]

I have a friend in China who's trying to learn software development by himself. It's ridiculously hard compared to the west. It shouldn't be underestimated how Wikipedia, Stackoverflow and Github can increase your learning speed.

[jjjjjjjjjjjjjjj]

Sounds strange. Programming resources usually aren't blocked here - even when they're on Wikipedia. StackOverflow isn't blocked, and GitHub hasn't been blocked either.

E: Excluding Google search I've only encountered one blocked programming resource when sporadically programming on my spare time here: golang.org - which I'm guessing is because it's on hosted on Google's servers.

[etaerc]

Yeah but how do you search for stuff there if google doesn't work? I.e. you try to learn "udp hole punching" how do you get the relevant wikipedia, stackoverflow etc pages?

[yorwba]

https://cn.bing.com or https://baidu.com

Chinese Bing has an interesting feature where it pop ups a dictionary definition when you hover over any English word in the search results. Even with that, not everyone's English is good enough to understand Wikipedia/StackOverflow/... so they use Baidu Baike/Zhihu/... as alternatives.

[aaomidi]

Does China block specific parts of wikipedia then? How do they know what part of wikipedia you're visiting?

[jjjjjjjjjjjjjjj]

Chinese Wikipedia is blocked. I thought parts of English Wikipedia was blocked somehow as well, but seems like that's outdated information (after they started enforcing https in June 2015[0]). You'll find a list of the blocking methods on the Great Firewall wiki article[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia#China [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall#Blocking_method...