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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.
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
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.