1

Those who called it a bug report will think that this is so severe and will belong in the class of Hemiptera (true bugs). ;D  I found out that because many documents and forms on wikiHow is hosted by Google, Chinese at mainland China are not accessible to them. (I noticed that because I am a Chinese at China too.) If you were at America or other free countries, this bug will not bother you. However, because wikiHow’s goal is to provide a worldwide how-to manual, solving this is essential.

Some examples of Google Forms and Google Documents are here:

https://docs.google.com/a/wikihow.com/forms/d/1lGows-kSzOjr06TNk2X7LMeLucaASo5bqUiWZEn-6o0/viewform (Patrollblock Practice Test)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AzjRwiv8gcgqIRihL37PN_yy3pIFPynETX50nBkXnBQ (Welcome Wagon Test)

Of course, there will be many more examples, but I cannot find them.

My opinion was to make them into PDFs without actually deleting the Google-hosted forms. That way, if a user cannot go to the Google-hosted form, he/she can use the PDF and send the answers to somebody else.

2

Here’s a quick workaround, pretty sure it works: Save the link to the form you wish to access (Part 2 of  https://www.wikihow.com/Use-the-Internet-Archive’s-Wayback-Machine ) and then access the archived link.:slight_smile:

3

I don’t think this is something that comes up often enough to take action on. If it were necessary, I’m sure an alternative option could be provided upon request (done entirely through email with the handling wikiHow staff member) rather than partially.

4

@Batreeq I bet that I cannot do that because I am at China, too, and I cannot open up any website on Google Forms and Google Documents. I made this because many other Chinese users, like me, cannot open them. That means they cannot even submit the Patrollblock Practice Test if they are patrollblocked!

@Tiagoroth I mean we can revise those Google-hosted documents and forms into PDFs and appoint a wikiHow staff to review the answers. However, we are not going to delete the Google-hosted documents and forms, leaving all users two ways to access those things, either by Google or by PDF if Google did not work.

5

To bypass internet censorship: https://www.wikihow.com/Use-a-VPN :slight_smile:

6

China’s Firewall blocks VPN, and the only way to do so is to connect to a VPN via the Tor network. China’s Great Firewall is very, very restrictive and is based on machine learning and they do DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) to determine if someone’s using a VPN

7

Really, no ways are accessible to bypass China’s Great Firewall. That is why I post this. I suggest to make up a project of converting these unaccessible pages into PDFs.

8

@Kindnesschen thanks for this suggestion - it’s great that you’re keeping inclusivity in mind as a priority that wikiHow should continue to hold dear! A couple of the other folks on this thread are right that this is actually a pretty infrequent issue for us. When it does occur that somebody can’t access our documents because of their location, Anna and I are more than happy to make special accommodations (as we did in your case)! Since those documents aren’t an essential part of using or contributing to wikiHow, though, I don’t think that it necessarily gets in the way of us serving our mission. Again, thanks for bringing this up!