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How the Chinese Wikipedia Differs from the English
bulled writes "News.com is running a story on differences found in Wikipedia's Chinese site content, as compared to content on the same subjects from the English site. The article goes into a discussion about how the 'sanitized' information is so prevalent in Chinese education that it is seen as the 'truth'." From the article: "[Some] say the object should be to spread reliable information as widely as possible, and that, in any case, self-censorship is pointless because the government still frequently blocks access to Wikipedia for most Chinese Internet users. 'There is a lot of confusion about whether they should obey the neutral point of view or offer some compromises to the government,' said Isaac Mao, a well-known Chinese blogger and user of the encyclopedia. 'To the local Wikipedians, the first objective is to make it well known among Chinese, to get people to understand the principles of Wikipedia step by step, and not to get the thing blocked by the government.'"
"To publicly suggest that Taiwanese have any historical basis for asserting their independence from China would be a career-ending offense for anyone in academia or in the news media."
A career-ending offense exicts in this country too, but just on different subjects. Try publicly saying that whites are smarter than blacks, or that teenage girls should have have hands-on sex ed in junior high, or that ice floes are a good way of relieving the social security crunch, and see what happens to your career. ( The previous three ideas or - similar forms of them - have been considered obvious truisms in other places and times. I'm not expressing these opinions myself, just mentioning them as examples )
Try putting any of these on english Wikipedia, and see how long they last.
this is true of everyone who has ever lived. including you. including me. it's simple human nature
however, this self-censorship, whether by individuals or cliques, is a different subject matter than censorship by a government entity. one is organic, from below, for the purposes of protecting the ego. the other is artificial, from above, for the purposes of maintaining power
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Dude, which country would you choose to live in?
Country #1 where people have free access to information and some choose to self censor that access?
Country #2 where the government censors information and unapproved distribution of censored information is a crime?
How many paedophilic images do you find on the English Wikipedia?
How many homosexual rape HOWTO entrees are there? Just how detailed are the Wikipedia's meth cooking/ricin making manuals?
When was the last time our Govt declassified a blueprint for a nuclear warhead?
A detailed travel schedule and the layout of alarm circuits in dubbyas house perhaps? No?
What, those are all illegal in US, you say?
Well, in China, all politically subversive public speech is illegal.
We all have our reasons for outlawing certain things. Are China's laws just? Who knows...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
As of the time of this post, the opening paragraph of the Chinese version reads something like this:
"June 4th Incident", also called "'89 Minyun" [short for Democratic Movement], , "'89 Xueyun" [short for Students' Movement], "June 4th Massacre", "June 4th Wave", "'89 Democratic Movement", "'89 Students' Movement", "Tiananmen Massacre", "Tiananmen Incident", etc, officially called "The Disturbance", "Counter-revolutionary riot", and in recent years "the Political Turmoil between Spring and Summer of 1989" by the PRC government, hereafter abbreviated to "64" [June 4th].
stillwaters: silent and reticent
"And the sinister students jumped under the tank wheels in the hopes of jamming the wheels with their bodies and blood. They ruined the Great Machinery of Our Motherland and stained Our Great Floor Tiles with their dripping evil flesh. May the reverent ghosts of our ancesters be pissing on them now and forever in their afterlife."
Table-ized A.I.
Do US schools censor educational internet sources for a subject like WWII? Nope
Are students encouraged to become proficient in the use of primary sources? Yup
Just because a textbook might be censored (a better word for most of them would be "incomplete") doesn't mean you can discredit the entire educational system.
Honestly, I've found articles in the English version that are no better. Just look at any article involving Ayn Rand. In those articles, Rand's followers make up the majority of editors, thus allowing them to get away with deleting any facts (even if they are cited) that they don't agree with. The articles about her are constantly censored simply because 1) Wikipedia is unequipped to deal with a biased mob attacking one or more articles, and 2) the sources that make Rand look bad are often deleted, thus making it look like the "truth" is that Rand has very few detractors.
In the Chinese Wikipedia, the government's bias censors the text; in the English Wikipedia, editorial mobs are glad to use their own bias to censor it.
While wikipedia articles that have strong "popularity" (however you describe that term) are more likely to be balanced, there is a tendancy for particularly some of the more obscure articles to have a few strong defenders with a manifestly strong point of view and bias, where any changes to those articles moving away from that bias and point of view is met with out right hostility and anger, invoking every obscure rule of Wikipedia behavior to justify their words and discouraging any compromising edits. Often these "article tzars" have support of Wikipedia administrators and others in supposed position of authority.
/. post about U.S. government censorship of Wikipedia alone would have thousands of replies in a matter of just an hour.
That said, I have been successful in making some rather substantial changes in some articles explicitly by showing the paper tigers for which some of those POV biases can be seen. And given enough time and eyeballs, most of these problems do eventually get ironed out. But it takes time and much of what you see on Wikipedia is a work in progress.
In defense of the Chinese Wikipedia, they are a couple of years behind and a fair bit under-represented in comparison to the Chinese speaking population to what the English Wikipedia has going for it. That and "official actions" by the PRC that tends to discourage participation on Wikipedia. Those that do participate operate under a "Sword of Damocles that could be lowered at any time by the PRC government. As I've pointed out myself on many occasions, it would be an incredibly inept Chinese government that would not know exactly who the major Wikipedia participants are, even those who don't necessarily live in China proper (like being a Chinese speaker in the USA, as an example). I'm talking the full names, addresses, and other identifying information about these people. The use of psuedonyms does not hide this information from the Chinese government.
There is justified concern in term of avoiding prison or even losing their life if they try to push too hard for the NPOV that the English Wikipedia enjoys. As for the U.S. government keeping track of its citizens, I'm sure that happens as well, but there would be a nearly instant and major outcry if there were such a similar crackdown within the USA. I'm sure the
Wikipedia is based on the principle of "relevance by consensus". While there is a requirement for providing references, there is no mechanism for objectively accepting or rejecting a reference or a theory. This leads in many cases to fringe theories of some interest group getting more attention than they should. The english wikipedia has the benefit of being international so that the diversity is larger and hence the process of reaching consensus is more complicated.
In China those same principles yield different results as the Chinese consensus on many political issues is not the same as the western/international consensus.
To be fair this plagues mostly the social sciences. Politics is largely based on opinion (and you can find whatever references you like, there are plenty of them) and history is has always been subjectively inclusive.
I call it the "Fox censorship". No it ain't just Fox.
I am from China. As an active contributor (with 16384+ edits) at English Wikipedia for almost three years. I don't see this a serious problem at Chinese Wikipedia. This is in fact a POV on region and nation. I see English Wikipedia does no better than its Chinese neighbor. For example, English Wikipedia claims a British man reached the source of Yangtze river in 19th century, while Genghis Khan's people had done the job 500 years before. People from UK and US always see us as autochthon. So if we do something, they will not count, so in westerners' view, before their arrive of America, no people live there (this is what you actually think, don't you?) English Wikipedia has many lists of these, lists of those, most of the lists never include non-Western stuffs, even it is far more notable in East Asian countries. (For example, almost everything in Category:Lists_of_fictional_things) English Wikipedia claims itself the largest encyclopedia in the world one year ago, but they still have http://en.wikipedia.org/Yongle_Encyclopedia , Chinese paper encyclopedia completed in 1407 almost as large as now Wikipedia as a stub. So my 3 years of experience at English Wikipedia shows me a very very emptiness of East Asia (or say CJK) cultures among average western people. I've corrected many POV things at Wikipedia, but I can't beat other 1,000,000+ contributors who created more at a much higher speed.