On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:51:59 +0200, geni geniice@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.