Hi Ziko  - These are interesting questions... perhaps some of the folks on the strategic planning China Task Force could help with that?  I'd be interested in the answers as well. Members are listed at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/China_Task_Force    and some questions of this nature are on the talk page. Philippe ____________________ Philippe Beaudette Facilitator, Strategic Planning Wikimedia Foundation philippe(a)wikimedia.org Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.  Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate On Oct 20, 2009, at 8:20 AM, Ziko van Dijk wrote: _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Hello, First of all, apologize for any inconvenience made by my poor grammar. As a Chinese, I should say, most people here knows (or uses) the Baidu Baike, because Baidu is commonly known in China Mainland so its service is well-known too. As for Hudong, although it's known as the largest Chinese encyclopedia (per it's main page), I should say that it's not so well-known as Baidu's. At least for me, I didn't heard about it unless someone mentioned it in the Village Pump. And for Zhwiki, the amount of users is increasing now because before the Olympics last year, the Chinese government unblocked the Wikipedia. As for the collaboration process, both Baidu and Hudong use a manual-checking process. That is if you submit a "sensitive" edit, it won't be displayed and possibly you'll be blocked without further notice. (But, if you just "vandalize" these two sites, like add some jokes, most of the time this would be passed and displayed...) And as I know, the Wikipedia is the only which requires a reliable source when adding something doubtful. So although "WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY", it's sure to be more reliable than the other two. After all, the last question: "how liberal is the content". The answer to this question will also solve the problem why the Chinese Wikipedia has fewer users from China Mainland. Because the server of the Wikipedia is placed in the USA, the Chinese government cannot "control" these (as it controls Baidu or Hudong or etc). So it use something called the "GFW" to block the Wikipedia from being accessed by China citizens since the Wikipedia is "neutral" and do not filter information as the government wants. For example, if you attempted to access [[:zh:六四事件]] (which is *very* "sensitive") you will see "Connection was reset" and you'll be unable to use the Wikipedia in 90 seconds. That also produced a bad impression like oh, the site is down. Clearly, you are not able to see any information about that on the "intranet" of China. That's something I can say about these three. Regards. Jimmy Xu On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 11:20 PM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk(a)googlemail.com> wrote: -- http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimmy_xu_wrk _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l