[WikiEN-l] We've been overtaken.

[Sherool]

On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:51:59 +0200, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hudong.com is now bigger than us:
>
> http://www.jlmpacificepoch.com/newsstories?id=139049_0_5_0_M
>
> In fact they may have broken 3 million but I can't read
>
> 全球最大中文百科由全球1,016,360位网民共同编写而成。共计3,050,203词条，32.7亿文字
>
> and I'm not totally certain their definition of article is the same as
> ours. Still I think we need to get a clearer idea of what is going on
> at Hudong.

Well my first impression afer clicking around for a while (via Google  
translate) is that it's mostly like Wikipedia with all the rules thrown  
out (wich I'm sure a lot of people might find appealing)... There seems to  
be very little emphasis on things like reliable sources (or even any  
sources in many cases), a lot of celebretry bios seems to play up various  
"sex scandals" reported only by fridge sensation rags and such, and have  
lenghty sections about likes and dislikes, pets and all sorts of cruft  
like that.

The copyright policy (or lack thereof) also seems to basicaly be that the  
site itself claim copyrihgt over all user contributions (although top  
contributors are publicly "credited" right on sidebar of the article, wich  
I guess is an easier way to make people feel appreciated than trying to  
explain to them how a free license works) and the image pages simply  
contain a disclaimer saying the image was submited by a user and may be  
copyrighted (wich to be fair is better than most sites manage). They are  
clearly not clamouring to be part of the free content movement that's for  
sure.

Some of the organization of contnet is interesting, articles appear to be  
organized under various "task groups" that seem to be their version of a  
"Wikiproject" but it's much more integrated in the software, giving stats  
about number of articles under the task, how complete it is, number of  
users who particupate and stuff like that. Some users also seems to be  
officialy designated as "experts" on various topics (wich may or may not  
be a good idea depending on how the acrediting works).

Hardly an in depth look and I'm sure there are tonnes of more insightfull  
stuff written about the site out there, just some personal observations  
after clicking around for 20 minutes trying to make sense of the machine  
translated text.


-- 
[[:en:User:Sherool]]