On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 5:54 AM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
I hadn't heard of Hudong before. This article by Rebecca Fannin calls it "China's Wikipedia" and says it has a 95% market share and more "than 5 million entries from 3.6 million contributors."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2011/08/23/why-draper-funded-china...
Yes, the roads not taken, both social and commercial, to say nothing of state controlled.
I never liked the phrase "China's Wikipedia" to describe what Hudong does, because, honestly, China's Wikipedia is zh.wikipedia.org. The journalist in this case, Rebecca Fannin, uses that term much too casually.
Also, while Hudong claims to be the largest, it's not that well known or famous, compared to what Baidu (the largest. most dominant search engine in China) does with their Baike encyclopedia (http://baike.baidu.com/)
That's not to say what Hudong does is bad -- the founder Pan Haidong has been to multiple Wikimanias and has been engaged with the Wikipedia community for many years.
Interestingly: Hudong's claim of "world's largest Chinese encyclopedia website" should be taken with a grain of salt. The reference in [[Hudong]] to this claim is a broken link, and even that was dubious to begin with.
-Andrew