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China is Recruiting 20,000 People To Write Its Own Wikipedia (vice.com)
The Chinese government is recruiting 20,000 people to create an online encyclopedia that will be the country's own, China-centric version of Wikipedia, or as one official put it, like "a Great Wall of culture." From a report: Known as the "Chinese Encyclopedia," the country's national encyclopedia will go online for the first time in 2018, and the government has employed tens of thousands of scholars from universities and research institutes who will contribute articles in more than 100 disciplines. The end result will be a knowledge base with more than 300,000 entries, each of which will be about 1,000 words long. "The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture," Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project and the chairman of the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, said. He added that China was under pressure from the international community to produce an encyclopedia that will "guide and lead the public and society."
costs $10000
China believes it is the only legitimate country on Earth and behaves accordingly.
They should hire Encarta team ... and watch Dan Pink ted talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation).
Will it have hookers and blackjack?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I for one am very excited to read their pages on Tibet and Falun Gong.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
I do look forward to the time when China can grow up and face it's real history.
You get U.S. history, warts and all as a freshman in college.
It's kinda painful how ignorant of U.S. history people with a high school degree can be at times.
Then picture a billion chinese with a similar depth of knowledge about their countries history (even recent stuff).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
....it already exists, and they are free to write/edit it themselves
There are over 30,000 registered users in the English Wikipedia.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There won't be any. Because those things don't exist. That's what the Memory Hole is for.
How do you translate "All Glory to the Hypnotoad!" into Chinese? It won't be complete without it.
as history is always written by the victors
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
What else is there to say?
Maybe Maduro can get some of his better fed Chavistas to make a Bolivarian wikipedia and spare us all our misguided views about the fabulous success of the revolution.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I'd say an even more apt 1984 comparison would be an Eastasian Ministry of Truth.
and who will be able to update pages ?
And then they'll have to retract half of it...
Would Chinese Wikipedia then be losing 1/6 of its user base? Analogous to the Turkish version.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Nothing we haven't seen before.
"We built the biggest and best wall, everybody knows it. We know walls, we've been doing them for thousands of years. Our wall is so yuuuge you can see it from space, and it works because, let me tell you, WE are still here and the looosers wiped out. Bing bam boom, Gone!"
Table-ized A.I.
as history is continually rewritten by the victors
On Falun Gong, it will say it is a cult.... because it is. Excuse China for having a low tolerance for cults.
The last time they let a cult go out of control (when a dude claimed he was Jesus reincarnate), it resulted in more deaths than any war in human history until that point (around the time of US civil war, only 20-30 times the deaths). If US had a cult based civil war of this magnitude, it would have shaped its world view as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Cults are to China as Fascism is to the West. It polices cults as the West monitors neo-nazi groups to keep them in check. If Europe can police antisemitic groups, China can police cults. They both have their historical wounds and different standards for reactions.
It's all good unless they start insisting still that the Chinese race is a direct descendant from the Chinese Homo Erectus. You know, to feel special and different from the rest and clearly a "superior" race. Hopefully they at least inspect the results before publishing the work to prevent the writers from pushing their own agendas and superstitions.
Navigate to http://permission/ Denied].cn
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I am not defending any "hypocrisy from authority" from a semi-totalitarian state nor am I suggesting perfect equivalence between anything - analogies, after all, can only go so far.
From what I recall from several decades ago, persecution started when Falun Gong did a large scale demonstration in the public spaces. This was seen as a flexing of muscle and the one-party establishment immediately recognized their potential for political organization and was alarmed, especially when it was jittery in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests. Such level of organization was probably seen as a precursor to an incredibly chaotic time.... for them, in light of the Taiping Rebellion, this is probably a precursor to a very bloody act of sedition (obviously, mere precursors are not acceptable standards in our societies, nor is repression of any kind, but this isn't our society and their historical experiences are not ours). So in that sense, it was Falun Gong which issued the first challenge.
Is CCP free speech oriented? Obviously not. Neither is Falun Gong (all cults talk free speech only when it suits them - I think you would agree with me on that. No one can criticize even one or two actions of a cult leader and still expect to stay in it without being cowered to submission). Their flexing of muscle was in part to muzzle a physicist who just wrote an article in a university magazine on the superstitious nature of Falun Gong.
What are you talking about? Tibet exists. It's a region of China. It has always been this way since the time of Confucius.
No. Mao was counter-revolutionary.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If they're using the wikipedia model, I expect their volunteer contributors will dwindle once the government starts imprisoning authors of edits they don't like.
Volunteers will be selected and they will all be working willingly even if they aren't
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Don't be silly. That's just Western revisionism. There was no Great Leap forward and no one ever starved.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
And the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
Drama is always played by the actors.
I think it is a good idea. As Chinese proverb puts it: "Let a hundred flowers blossom".
Besides the Taiping Rebellion, there was the cult of Mao and the Great Leap Forward famine which also killed about 20 million people...
Back in the 1400s, when China sent large groups of ships around the globe, they distributed copies of their 'encyclopedias' as gifts to leaders of other countries they visited. Many inventions credited to Leonardo da Vinci came from such reference materials. It's nice to see that original spirit live on today.
So now we'll have marxapedia to contrast with conservapedia..
A fitting addition to the age of Fake News and Alternative Facts.
That isn't how Wikipedia works; that's how Nupedia worked.
Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars (ideally with PhDs) to volunteer content. Before it ceased operating, Nupedia produced 25 approved articles that had completed its review process (three articles also existed in two versions of different lengths), and 74 more articles were in progress
If they want their own Wikipedia, they can't be restricting the pool of authors and trying to exercise top-down control on the content. OTOH, if they want Nupedia, they are on the right track.
Nupedia was designed by committee, with experts to predefine the rules, and it approved only 21 articles in its first year, compared to Wikipedia posting 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year
Good luck with that, China.