[Foundation-l] Comparison of Chinese Wikipedia, Hudong and Baidu Baike

[Jimmy Xu]

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 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Having read
> http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/14/wiki.china/
> I would like to collect more information about the situation of online
> encyclopedias in China Mainland. I am now browsing a litte bit around
> with Google Translator, but it remains difficult to get an impression
> concerning the following questions:
> * how the collaboration process differs
> * how good is the content
> * how liberal is the content (not contamined directly or indirectly by
> the government)
> Does someone of you knows more?
>
> Kind regards
>
>
> --
> Ziko van Dijk
> NL-Silvolde
>
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