The NetBlocks internet observatory has collected technical evidence of the blocking all editions of Wikipedia in Venezuela as of 12 January 2019. The restrictions are implemented by the largest telecommunications provider CANTV.

The study comprising 60,000 metrics has also identified a major network disruption affecting telecommunications infrastructure, coinciding with the other restrictions, that will have impacted Venezuelans’ ability to communicate and access information during the previous 24 hours.

In context The site appeared to be partially accessible as of morning 14th January 2019 though the block is ongoing; the contested Wikipedia articles remained locked down by editors.

The restrictions are understood to follow a bitter Wikipedia edit war where editors put forward conflicting views, during which newly-appointed National Assembly president Juan Guaidó was listed as “president number 51 of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”

Data also show that a number of local sites have been recently restricted, indicating that recent political instability may be the underlying cause for a tightening regime of internet controls.

Venezuela joins Turkey as the only other country presently known to block the entirety of the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia.

The findings are corroborated by several CANTV subscribers who report they can only access Wikipedia using VPN connections which can circumvent censorship.

It could not be ascertained at the time of writing whether an official blocking order has been issued or whether the restriction is intended to be permanent. Other Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons have not been affected.

The NetBlocks Group is a civil society group working at the intersection of digital rights, cyber-security and internet governance. Independent and non-partisan, NetBlocks strives for an open and inclusive digital future for all.</s>
• For years, “High School Musical” actor Corbin Bleu has had one of the most-translated Wikipedia pages of any person in history.
• His page has more translations than anyone else alive except for Barack Obama.
• It’s bewildered people for years, since MIT analyzed Wikipedia data in 2016.
• A Reddit user may have found the culprit: a polyglot Bleu superfan who goes by the aliases “Chase Watson” and “Zimmer611” on Wikipedia.
• Corbin Bleu’s page has gotten 20 more translations since the 2016 MIT study, bringing up his total to 213 languages.

In 2016, MIT’s media lab conducted a study analyzing the most popular people on Wikipedia. They found the people with the most translated pages on the site. The top results weren’t too surprising – Jesus Christ, Barack Obama, Adolf Hitler, Confucius – you know, the usual.

But sitting there at No. 3 was Corbin Bleu, the actor most famous for his supporting role in the 2006 Disney Channel movie “High School Musical.” With 193 languages, his page had more translations than those for Mozart, Hitler, Da Vinci, and Einstein.

As BuzzFeed News noted at the time, it was bizarre. Why was a minor celebrity such a big deal on Wikipedia? And why did his page have more translations than even Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, or Ashley Tisdale?

Bleu’s immense Wikipedia presence has been a mystery since. It recently became the subject of a post in the Unsolved Mysteries subreddit, where a Reddit user going by the name Lithide may have solved it.

According to Lithide, Wikipedia records suggest that a bulk of the Wikipedia translations were made and are maintained by a user using a handful of IP addresses based in Saudi Arabia. The user seems to have several different accounts on the site, and goes by the name “Chace Watson” in the English Wikipedia and “Zimmer611” in the Arabic Wikipedia.

It’s possible, Lithide said, that Chase Watson and Zimmer 611 are two different people. But the identity presented on Watson’s page – ostensibly a gamer in Germany – doesn’t add up. The user doesn’t use the account to edit Bleu’s German page, for instance.

“I actually think there’s a dedicated fan of Corbin Bleu from Saudi Arabia who wanted to make sure there were Wikipedia articles for their idol in every language possible and also spent a few dozen hours working on the Arabic-language article,” Lithide wrote.

In the years since the MIT Media Lab study, there have been 20 more translations of Bleu’s name on the site, bringing the total up to 213 languages, according to Wikipedia’s own records. (Wikipedia uses “interwikis” as a metric to record page translations.)

But he’s slid down in the rankings, now at No. 5. Ronald Reagan surged to the No. 1 spot of people with the most-translated Wikipedia page, with 248 different translations. In 2016, Reagan didn’t even rank in the top 100, having had only 107 translations. He’s now followed by Jesus (244 translations) and Michael Jackson (234 translations).

Barack Obama remains the person alive with the most translations and has the fourth overall, with 228.

Bleu would need 15 more translations to catch up to him, but he’s also at risk of being taken over by Leonardo Da Vinci, whose page has just one fewer translation than him.

A representative for Bleu didn’t immediately respond to INSIDER’s request for comment.
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• Lil Tay’s Instagram account is being used to wage a harassment campaign against her father while a battle over her future continues</s>Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro started a second, six-year term Thursday amid international cries urging him to step down and return democratic rule to a country suffering a historic economic implosion.

Maduro says he is going to turn around an economy whose collapse he blamed on U.S. sanctions. However, few experts see signs that his policies will rescue the once-wealthy OPEC nation. Inflation is soaring, internal political divisions are deepening and millions of Venezuelans have left the country.

The Associated Press explains Venezuela's economic and political crisis:

Venezuela has the world's largest underground oil reserves, but crude production continues to crash. Its natural wealth made it once one of Latin America's wealthiest countries, pumping 3.5 million barrels of crude daily when President Hugo Chavez took power and launched the socialist revolution. Oil has been Venezuela's prime source of hard cash, and leaders historically haven't developed other sectors of the economy. Output now has plummeted to less than a third of its historic high, and critics blame that on years on rampant corruption and mismanagement of the state-run oil firm PDVSA.

The economy in 2019 will continue to contract and inflation will skyrocket at a staggering 23 million percent, forecasts Francisco Rodriguez, a former Venezuelan official who is now chief economist at the New York-based Torino Capital. That is a result of low oil prices compounded by the declining production, Venezuela's growing financial isolation, years of price and currency controls and heavy government spending in the collapsing local currency. Many Venezuelans struggle to afford food and basic goods. Today, the minimum wage that amounts to less than $5 a month — and is shrinking.

Maduro has successfully maintained power, opposed by a fractured opposition. The hand-picked successor of Chavez won a second term in a May election that opponents and many in the international community reject as a sham. Maduro's government has jailed or driven into exile its most popular opposition leaders. Among them, Leopoldo Lopez remains under house arrest. Government opponents consider him a political prisoner.

Internationally, the United States and a coalition of a dozen Latin American countries reject Maduro's government. However, leftist allies such as Cuba and Bolivia maintain their support, while Maduro has deepened economic and political ties with Russia, China and Turkey.

An estimated 2.3 million people have fled hyperinflation, food and medical shortages over the last two years, according to the United Nations, most going to nearby Colombia, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador. Leaders in those countries say they struggle to handle the influx. Many of the migrants arrive sick and hungry, needing medical care.</s>It is hard to imagine life without Wikipedia. That's especially the case if you have school-age children, who now turn to it by default for information when working on homework. Less well-known is the importance of Wikipedia for scientists, who often use its pages for reliable explanations of basic concepts:

Physicists -- researchers, professors, and students -- use Wikipedia daily. When I need the transition temperature for a Bose-Einstein condensate (prefactor and all), or when I want to learn about the details of an unfamiliar quantum algorithm, Wikipedia is my first stop. When a graduate student sends me research notes that rely on unfamiliar algebraic structures, they reference Wikipedia.

That's from a blog post on the open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) Web site. It's an announcement of an interesting new initiative to bolster the number of physicists contributing to Wikipedia by writing not just new articles for the online encyclopedia, but peer-reviewed ones. The additional element aims to ensure that the information provided is of the highest quality -- not always the case for Wikipedia articles, whatever their other merits. As the PLOS post explains, the new pages have two aspects:

A peer-reviewed 'article' in [the flagship online publication] PLOS ONE, which is fixed, peer-reviewed openly via the PLOS Wiki and citable, giving information about that particular topic. That finalized article is then submitted to Wikipedia, which becomes a living version of the document that the community can refine, build on, and keep up to date.

The two-pronged approach of these "Topic Pages" has a number of benefits. It means that Wikipedia gains high-quality, peer-reviewed articles, written by experts; scientists just starting out gain an important new resource with accessible explanations of often highly-technical topics; and the scientists writing Topic Pages can add them to their list of citable publications -- an important consideration for their careers, and an added incentive to produce them.

Other PLOS titles such as PLOS Computational Biology and PLOS Genetics have produced a few Topic Pages previously, but the latest move represents a major extension of the idea. As the blog post notes, PLOS ONE is initially welcoming articles on topics in quantum physics, but over time it plans to expand to all of physics. Let's hope it's an idea that catches on and spreads across all academic disciplines, since everyone gains from the approach -- not least students researching their homework.

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All editions of Wikipedia are blocked in Venezuela by state-owned CANTV amid an ongoing political crisis.