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Self-Censoring 'Chinese Wikipedia' Launched
Billosaur writes "New Scientist is reporting that Baidu, China's largest search engine, is launching its own version of Wikipedia. The site, Baidupedia, differs from the more well-known Wikipedia in that it is self-censoring." From the article: "Unlike Wikipedia, which allows anyone to create and modify entries, Baidupedia is censored by the company to avoid offending the Chinese government. Entries to the encyclopaedia must first pass a filtering system before being added to the site. Baidupedia bars users from including any 'malicious evaluation of the current national system', any 'attack on government institutions', and prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'."
The Chinese government has no right to do that under any circumstances.
It is my impression that one has every right to fork Wikipedia or otherwise imitate it.
Now, restricting access to one site over the other is a completely different story.
Just to clarify, the chinese government blocked Wikipedia back in 2005.
I did a search on "Intel" and got some Intel-info, written in Chinese. :)
I then did a search on "Falun Gong" - and then got "The page cannot be displayed" from my browser. I now can't get in again. Did they ban me for that? Well, I'm not crying
In an unrelated story, sales of the book, "Beavis and Butt-Head Ensucklopedia" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beavis_and_butthead# Books) have recently sky-rocketed.
The Chinese version of Wikipedia has only 67k articles for several years of development, however this Baidu encyclopedia already has more articles than that within several days. Why is that? It is because Baidu doesn't care about copyrights. According to their user agreement/disclaimer (which is only available in Chinese), the content will be released under GFDL and/or CC-SA 2.5 (which are incompatible) and at the same time all copyrights are reserved by Baidu. In fact there are a bunch of other contradictions within the same document. On the other hand, its users also doesn't care about copyrights too, because many of the articles are just copied from all the sites around the web.
Therefore we don't have to take this Baidu encyclopedia seriously, because even Baidu doesn't take this encyclopedia seriously. They launch this project just to create cohesion within its users.
<conspiracy>However there is one more interesting thing about this Baidu encyclopedia: Baidu as a search engine raises to prominence in China after Google is blocked. And if you don't know already, the Chinese Wikipedia (actually all the wikimedia projects) is blocked in China. Coincidence?</conspiracy>
Ah, but they do:
And, in case there was any doubt,
Of course, there's Article 51.
http://outcampaign.org/
West Bengal has been running under a democratically elected communist party since 1977. See also:a rties
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Communist_p
Students at the Tianamen square were but a tiny ant's piss: they did and do not represent significant proportion of chinese as whole. His point is entirely valid: if enough chinese did want things we in the west take for granted, they would get it. They don't, at least not yet.
You really don't have clue about the scale of it do you. There were protest up to 100,000 people in the streets of Beijing early May. And there were protests in every major cities in China during the month. If you weren't old enough to read in 1989 you can do it now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_prot ests_of_1989
2600 died and 30000 injuried over one single night. That's about the same number on the war with iraq since 2003. That's an ant's piss to you eh?
Chinese Wikipedia was blocked, and not much response came from the tech atmosphere. Wikipedians even conjectured that China was preparing to launch their own version of Wikipedia... well, now, that has happened. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Wikipedia _in_mainland_China and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-10-31/China_block
And, oddly enough, much of the content in Baidupedia was copied directly from the real Chinese Wikipedia, at zh.wikipedia.org.
Exactly rightly said. I am in China now, and has been visiting almost every other year since '99. I've many colleagues and friends who were Chinese and now living in other countries.
..."
Most outside commentators just don't understand how much has changed here. You cannot comprehend how is it to move forward with a population of 1.3Bn with a 3000+ years of unbroken history that is more varied than the entire Europe put together.
It definitely isn't the same as some small Eastern European state where a march down the square will change and solve everything.
People here are optimistic. 5 years ago, there's hardly any private cars. Nowadays there are traffic jams. 5 years ago, people pay for their goods with stack full of cash. These days, they swipe. 15 years ago, you walk into a shop, "Take it or leave it", these days, "Welcome, have a look at our
As for freedom, have you watched the stuff that's shown on TV here these days? There are plenty of current affairs, COPs type of shows. There are 'sex health' shops in every city. OK, so you can't shit on everyone like in Hyde Park. But is being able to that a measure of the quality of life?
Although saying that, it is really stupid and frustrating that I cannot look up some info in Wikipedia, although everyone knows the proxies to circumvent that!