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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.
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!
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)
NO. They will not have to write their own.
Most articles are not controversial at all, and they will just sync them with Wikipedia. They can even do a real time sync, so that when Chinese editors update their version the updates go straight to Wikipedia.
The controversial articles will be home grown. But that is only a small fraction of the total.
That is the Archillies heal of Wikipedia. It can be selectively and repeatably forked. I see Russian and Turkish versions very soon.
He who controls the past controls the future...
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.
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+
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
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.