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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'."
Unpossible!
Everyone knows the USA is much worse than china...
...the wikipedia edits you!
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
I looked up "abominable snowman" and it told me it was "a large primate-like creature supposedly living in the mountains of censored."
prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'.
Yeah, they'll give the breakers of this rule a healthy dose of soma.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
That's a Chinese Fox News.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
The irony is that this is fairly close to what many western critics of Wikipedia propose. 'Moral responsibility', stronger 'editorial controls', protection of living people, 'accountability', anyone?
I guess this post is kinda flamebaity, but well...
I'm afraid we consider that a negative and dispirited post.
It's the wall for you. Smile. Your children will be with you. Only one of them will have a real bullet.
KFG
Flamebait me if you want, but companies DO have rights to censorship. Heck, Slashdot censors. Otherwise, every article here might be M$ bashing or Linux raves. Or, endless dupes (oh wait, this happens already). Back to my point, companies can censor if they want. Users just don't have to go there. Why go to Baidupedia when you can go to Wikipedia? Yes, there is a Chinese language section of Wikipedia.
As far as I'm concerned, Chinese companies can censor all they want...so long as the government doesn't force them to use only Baidupedia and block Wikipedia.
By the way, Google owns 2% of Baidu. And as we all know, DO NO EVIL! (yes, full of sarcasm)
So then are you taking the position that the high esteem for free speech is *not* a value that should be universally shared?
That it's not okay to speak out against the values of the culture you are in?
Somebody mod this guy down!!!
Er... wait...
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
However, we can do little more.
Freedom in China ultimately depends on the citizenry. Barring external intervention, the future of a people are determined by the people. Period.
Back in 1989, Czechoslovakia had a population of about 15.6 million. In November of that year, 800,000 citizens assembled in Prague and demanded freedom. 800,000 is about 5% of the nation's population.
The story repeated itself in all of Eastern Europe. Once it was free from the external intervention of the Soviet Union, the Eastern Europeans collectively decided that they wanted freedom, and they got it. They forced their authoritarian governments out of power.
The story is quite different in China. No one is imposing authoritarian rule on China. If the Chinese people wanted to enjoy the same democracy and human rights that we have in the West, then the Chinese people could get democracy and human rights tomorrow. The problem is that most Chinese either support authoritarianism or are indifferent to it. President Hu Jintao (the dictator of China), all by himself, cannot impose authoritarian rule on China. Hu has a lot of supporters.
That is the difference between Eastern Europe and China. I respect the Eastern Europeans.
"The Chinese government is not responsible for the censorship."
Let me get this straight...
Because a company chooses to pre-emptively censor its content to avoid government action against it, the government is not responsible for the censorship? Are you kidding?
Do you think Baidu would censor this wiki if it wasn't the policy of China to censor content and prosecute (or otherwise handle) offenders?
That's afwul, awful, apologist logic.
Glass houses and throwing stones and all that (I'm in the US) but really...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Everyone knows that the USA is great as long as it's better than China! National wiretapping? That's fine, it's not as bad as China! "Free Speech Zones"? In China, they don't even get free speech, so that's okay too! Imprisoning citizens indefinitely without trial? In China, they do it a lot more!
Yay, go USA! We're Not As Bad As China (TM)!
I notice that articles about China seem to bring a certain number of posts about how we in the west shouldn't be arrogant and assume, that just because we value freedom of speech and such rights, the chinese people want the same freedoms. And of course there ARE cultural differences between East and West. But I also have to wonder...if the chinese people are so content with the pace of change in society, then why does the government need all those citizen censors, and great firewalls, and controlled wikis? It would seem that there would be no need for such stringent methods of control when the people don't want western ideas.
This is where it got them.
Seriously, you need to read up a little more on just how extensive the demonstrations around Tiananmen Square really were. That wasn't one guy and a bunch of tanks. It was thousands and thousands of people, getting shot in the back by troops armed with assault rifles as they fled. I recommend a recent Frontline special, called "The Tank Man," for more information.
Breakfast served all day!
I agree on censoring, but go to the main page and you see a lot of question marks. China, you've gone TOO far this time!
Communism's been tried? Where? I have been told that Marx never espoused a single party system, which as I see it is the problem with all the "communist" governments that have been around. Cuba, China, the USSR, all single party... Personally, I'd be very curious to see what a communist system (i.e. the government owns everything, etc) combined with democratic elections (or some other means of forcing at least some accountability on the government) would be like.
Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities make sense in terms of his or her own culture. Some followers of this principle are the Khmer Rouge, the Taliban, and practitioners of Sati.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, outlining the organization's view on the human rights guaranteed to all people. Chief amount these rights are:
* The right to life, liberty and security of person.
* The right to an education.
* The right to participate fully in cultural life.
* Freedom from torture or cruel, inhumane treatment or punishment.
* Freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
* Freedom of expression and opinion.
It is interesting to note that China, being a permanent Security Council, should feel obliged to follow these declarations, but does not.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Fuck this "much worse" shit. It doesn't matter if you're better than a hundred repressive totalitarian regimes.
What matters is what your ideals are and how closely you live them.
We supposedly value "justice". But we seem to be living "vigilantism". And there are people who are 100% okay with that.
The only difference between them and any Chinese executives filtering content is where they were born. If they had been born in China instead of the US, they'd be 100% behind their government's actions to stop the democracy movement.
So in China... NPOV becomes PGPOV? (pro government point of view)?
LOL. That's funny stuff. In the US, they reject text for not having a neutral point of view. In China, they reject text for not having a "positive" point of view.
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/
My girlfriend is Chinese, and it's really fun to talk to her family about the cultural differences between China and America. For example, they were amazed that in American parks there are ducks and geese that can just walk around, and even go up to people for food. Apparently in China there would be a problem with people trying to catch the ducks, so that in the few places where you can see ducks out in public they stay the hell away from people. The same goes for flowers, which apparently aren't normally grown in parks because people would just pick them all!
This isn't to suggest that in China there isn't a value for the public good. Quite the contrary. Just a few years ago if you went to the Temple of Heaven the big steps that lead into the temple weren't fenced off at all. Specifically, there is a huge relief carving that goes up through the center of the stairs, and people had enough respect and common sense not to abuse that privelege by walking on it, or vandalizing it. All through Beijing there are landmarks that weren't protected at all from the people, because they didn't need to be. Of course, a lot of this has changed recently, and in the past few years some of these things have started to be fenced off.
On the Linux note, her parents view Linux with a kind of mild amusement. They find it somewhat humorous that people would spend so much time and effort to write free software, and think I'm kind of crazy for choosing a career with Linux.
#include ".signature"
this thought just ocurred to me.
.cn (they surely are the lion's share of the hack attempts at my site).
.cn from my home (dsl based) site. I usually do /16 blocks on their netblocks, as I discover them, anyway.
mostly, the portscan and connect attempts (break-ins) are from
I'm perfectly happy to ban all of
but how about this for a pro-active idea? put photos of tienenmen sq. (the REAL photos - you know what I mean) on your home page. that, alone, should get your IP blocked by the chinese gov.
end result: you've just installed a spamblock closer to the source than you could ever accomplish without their 'help'.
I think I'm going to try this. (what is there to lose?)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
No, it isn't possible if you live in a country that is either
a) under a government structure that prevents dissent (Cuba)
b) is too apathetic to dissent and hold the government accountable for its actions (the USA)
Socialism and free enterprise are two approaches to the same problems, neither of which have a guaranteed outcome.
Guess what: socialism works in a million American communities every day. Assuming you live in a city, I hope you have water, sewage, and roads. You and your community assign these responsibilities to (and pay) a government that is directly responsible to you. If the jobs don't get done, you should go to meetings and find out what the hell is wrong.
If you are too apathetic or stupid to hold your local government responsible for its failings, it isn't a failing of socialism--it is your fault for being a shitty citizen. That's Democracy, chum. And if your government is competent, you have every right as a citizen of a democracy to elect to give them whatever economic responsibilities you want to.
Go read up on rural electrification in America. It would not have happened without government sponsored electric cooperatives, because no investor in their right mind would have tackled the problem. Socialism is an extension of the idea of the cooperative approach to problem solving. It is a choice, and can coexist with free-market solutions, just like credit unions coexist with banks. It is one approach, and is not itself inherently evil or flawed.
The free enterprise approach is also neither fundamentally evil nor flawed. But, just like a cooperative approach, if you have a nest of corrupt, self-serving players running the game with no oversight or accountability, you will have a shitty outcome (Enron, Qwest, Savings & Loans).
By the way, if your local government sics police dogs on you every time you question their choices, that's not a failing of socialism either--that's a police state, and it would be that way regardless of who is in charge of building roads. The state does whatever the hell they want, to make sure that they can keep exploiting you.
If you're going to be a libertarian, at least get fscking clue. Oppression is the inevitable consequence of a monopoly on power. The monopolist will use their position to fight dirty against anybody who challenges them. This goes for politics and a free market economy. A real libertarian knows that a one-party state run by capitalist oligarchs is far more dangerous and oppressive to its citizens than a socialist democracy, because a socialist democracy has accountability and can change anytime the people are motivated.