[WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.

[Dana Lutenegger]

With regard to the Chinese examples specifically, they may have a lot of
articles, but content-wise, they are a mess. And that isn't just me, the
biased Wikipedia editor saying that. A lot of Chinese people I've talked to
don't trust their content either, particularly Hudong, which is worse than
Baidu Baike. In addition, their communities are weak in terms of project
building, I think. Editors may create articles to gain in their point
systems, but they have no buy-in in terms of making a good encyclopedia,
because they don't make those decisions. Finally, I doubt that we will have
to compete with them in any other languages, because Chinese websites just
don't seem to be interested in that. There are enough mainland Chinese users
for any website to live off of. The largest video portal site in China,
Youku, doesn't even have a version in traditional Chinese characters, much
less any foreign language. There are plenty of similar examples.

All of this is just to say, I think there is still space for Wikipedia, even
when other competitors exist. When Chinese people are exposed to Wikipedia,
they seem to like it and find it reliable. The hard part is getting that
exposure.