Yes, the roads not taken, both social and commercial, to say nothing of state controlled.

I think that it is also worth pointing out that, in my experience, articles on Hudong are pretty bad. They are poorly formatted, poorly written, generally lack inline referencing, and often have copyright violations. Baidu Baike is of somewhat higher quality, though I think that both pale in comparison to the best of Wikipedia. We definitely shouldn't be viewing this in number terms alone. I admit that I am not an editor on either of the Chinese online encyclopedias, but my impression is that editors there lack a sense of ownership over what they write. I don't mean ownership in the negative sense of owning individual articles, but in the positive sense of feeling like they have a say in how things are run. Nameless, faceless administrators censor politically objectionable content without explanation, and things like notability standards, template formatting and Manual of Style type issues don't seem to be addressed by the community. As has been noted many times, there is a point system in which frequent editors can gain higher rankings, but these rankings seem to confer mostly prestige, and not much concrete beyond that. I'm not convinced that this model will produce a better encyclopedia in the long run. Of course, I freely admit that I am a Wikipedia guy, and don't go over to the Chinese encyclopedias much, so if I am missing some strong sense of purpose that is actually felt by editors there, someone else should chime in and let me know. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Nevertheless I wouldn't be surprised to see a billion dollar IPO for either of them. Fred _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l