2008/6/12 Titan Deng <theodoranian(a)gmail.com>om>:
No, it's not true. If you can read the list (the
link I gave), those
articles are not controversial articles, not sensitive to the Chinese
government at all. Baidupedia has political censorship, and their staff
review and filter all materials which might be regarded as sensitive to
Chinese government.
I think this is a miscommunication - that is Henning's point. The
articles Baidu reuses are the politically unimportant ones, ones which
wouldn't need any censorship. As matters stand, Wikipedia can't get
these articles out into China; the firewall blocks the zh.wp articles
on Tiananmen Square and on cosmology without caring what's in them.
As a result, Baidu's copying of them means that people in China can at
least get *some* of our content, rather than none at all.
Of course it
would be nice if they would acknowledge the license and
give proper attribution. But they can't - Wikipedia is banned and they
can't name this source.
The ban is not relative to their copyright violation. Wikipedia is not
prohibited to mention. The Great Fire Wall blocks the website with its url (
wikipedia.org).
At least, according to GFDL, they can still mention 5 main authors instead
of mentioning Wikipedia.
Mmm... this may work. Finding five main authors is so tricky that we
usually recommend a link to the wp history page, though - and a link
to a blocked site is pretty useless in terms of actually giving
attribution!
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk