06/ 8/2004
Thinking of Chinese Wikipedia
Post @ 08:13 in Chinese Blogosphere - Chinese Culture - Digital Culture
A lot of confirms from Chinese Bloggers confirmed that Chinese Wikipedia was blocked in China. Through my refer system, I saw a dutch weblog "wikipeida benutzer" quote my previous post. Although I couldn't understand what he/she was talking about, I find a good link from his blog: Chinese Build Free Net Encyclopedia. After some of interviews with active contributors in Chinese wikipedia, the article point out why wikipedia was not blocked in China at that time, and predicted potential risks of blocking by Chinese censors.
One reason why Chinese Wikipedia has not been blocked by Chinese censors may be the site's insistence that all entries reflect a neutral point of view, a policy that defines all Wikipedia versions in other languages. The neutral point of view is intended to avoid editing wars between contributors competing to impose their interpretation of various subjects on other readers.
As Andrew Lih said:
"The site is not blocked en masse at the site level because its not obviously pro or against anything because of the neutral point of view policy,"
Another reason Chinese Wikipedia has not been blocked by Chinese censors may be its low profile and relatively small group of regular contributors. As the site gets more attention and attracts more contributors, Chinese censors may decide to block access to the site, giving an indication of how much exposure censors are willing to tolerate for a site like this,
I saw plenty of debates on shizhao's comment page (who is a pioneer Chinese wikipedian and a administrator of Chinese wikipedia), Some Taiwan contributors complained his arbitrary deletion on their works, most of them are caused by sensitive topics such as: definition of Republic of China, Taiwan's WHO bid etc. Actually here is a big culture conflict between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. There just only one version of Chinese wikipedia called "zhongwen" wikipeida, its include both two kinds of Chinese characters. So it's mean no major Chinese character was preferred on site. The problem is mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese have different practice to write in Chinese. It's kinda of complicate.
Another debate wave is on the political issue, These topics easily drive contributors lost their patients. Obviously, at this point, contributors (even visitors) were missing one of most important principle in wikipedia: Reflect neutral point of view.
Wikipedia is a very attractive project, I do appreciate they efforts on thousands of Chinese entries. I hope to see that more and more contributors join this project to represent professional information, But if people are focusing on debates to define what kind of major Chinese should be used in Chinese wikipeida, The project couldn't widely participate by others.
23 Comments
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Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, says block only lasted a few days. Is Wikpedia service back up now? (August 9, 2004)
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