Chinese Wikipedia

[Poetlister]

Prime Tortoise of the Record Bureau (T-H-L)

Given to Emperor Zhenzong 1006 years and two weeks ago, during the Song Dynasty.

The lede needs redrafting: "It was the last of the Four Great Books of Song, the previous three encyclopedias published in the 10th century" is rather confusing, though you can guess what it means.

[Poetlister]

How Baidu built an encyclopedia with 16 times more Chinese entries than Wikipedia

Transition from hard format encyclopaedias to open-source encyclopaedias has raised some quality-of-information issues though

Jiang Ting is not your average K-pop fan from China. The 35-year-old from Inner Mongolia has turned her detailed knowledge of Korean pop stars into actual entries in the world’s biggest Chinese encyclopaedia and earned prizes for it.

scmp.com

This gives an insight into how someone with enough resources could build a viable alternative to Wikipedia.

[Osborne]

There are three important user groups on Baidu Baike. One is the Baike Elite Team, the second are the campus ambassadors, made up of students, and the third is the expert team [with over 2,000 members], which includes university professors.

[Beeblebrox]

"Some entries that can be easily found on Wikipedia Chinese do not even exist on Baidu Baike, particularly entries on sensitive topics in China.
None of the following can be found on Baidu Baike – Hong Kong’s Occupy Central, a large-scale show of civil disobedience that began in Hong Kong on September 28, 2014 aimed at making the economic structure and power relations in society more fair, Hong Kong’s ongoing anti-extradition bill protests, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei.
A spokesman for Baidu Baike declined to comment on the absence of sensitive material."

And there you have it. They play ball with the government, so they get more Chinese contributors, but a heavily censored encyclopedia. Free snacks for contributing though.

[Osborne]

That is to be expected. If you don't play ball with the government then you either disappear, or get jailed and publicly (on tv) humiliated. Even live-streams are censored, of course the "encyclopedia" is censored too.

[Eric Corbett]

That is to be expected. If you don't play ball with the government then you either disappear, or get jailed and publicly (on tv) humiliated. Even live-streams are censored, of course the "encyclopedia" is censored too.

That's what happens in all command economies, Wikipedia included. The unseemly haste with which the contributions of anyone accused, however flimsy the evidence, of "sockpuppetry" is ample evidence of that.

[Poetlister]

Yes, of course China is not exactly a liberal democracy, which is why they want a substitute for Wikipedia that tows the party line. Its hard to imagine the government of a free country bothering to do such a thing. And of course a body of 2000 experts wouldn't have an easy time on Wikipedia, though if they co-ordinated and got a few of themselves made admins or even arbs then things might work out for them.

[Beeblebrox]

The situation in Turkey is similar but almost farcical in its implementation. A Turkish Wikipedian gave a presentation on this in Boston. Here's the notes https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/wcna2019-3353 (recording wasn't done to protect the identity of the presenter)

So, Turkey bullied WP, and also Twitter, YouTube and others to play ball and remove content the Turkish government found to be defamatory to itself. The corporate websites caved in, gotta make that paper, but WP did not. The Turkish government then banned WP, and also stated that they wouldn't unban them until they opened an office in Turkey, from which hey would ...wait for it... pay taxes on their ad revenues.

So, it seems as if in actuality the persons making the law hadn't even looked at WP before banning it.

Turkey's approach is more to try and block access in order to punish the website, not to punish it's own citizens, so it's not near as bad as China's policy, even if it makes little to no sense. Circumventing the ban to view WP is not prosecuted. A Wikipedia mirror was put up that can be accessed (but not edited) from inside Turkey and the government has simply ignored it, even though it contains the same supposedly defamatory material. Some Turks are still editing via VPNs or Tor but overall activity on the Turkish WP is way, way down.

The WMF has taken the matter to the European Court of Human Rights.

[Poetlister]

Unfortunately, politicians are too often irrational and inconsistent, and the dictatorial kind are usually worse than the democratic ones. In Turkey in particular, it is assumed that anyone not explicitly pro the president is probably a Gulenist (Fethullah Gülen (T-H-L) being the equivalent of Emmanuel Goldstein (T-H-L) in 1984) and therefore must be dealt with.

[Hannah]

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59081611

[Smiley]

"Wikipedia, especially Chinese Wikipedia, is a balance," says Enming Yan, a former administrator of the site, with greater editing powers, who now lives outside the mainland. He has been banned from the platform, but he denies misusing it.

Meanwhile, Mr Yan says he's helping to build a new platform that will be representative of the Beijing point of view, albeit one that will be state-censored.

[Poetlister]

I already noted this in another thread.

[Hannah]

I already noted this in another thread.

I didn't realize this was already posted elsewhere, sorry.

[Poetlister]

I already noted this in another thread.

I didn't realize this was already posted elsewhere, sorry.

That's quite OK.