China Takes on Wikipedia with Its Own Online Encyclopedia

Megalith

Megalith

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On a scale of 1 to 10, how biased and censored do you think China’s version of Wikipedia will be? This will actually be an online version of the country’s official encyclopedia, cleverly named “Chinese Encyclopedia,” and unlike everyone’s favorite stateside online compendium, China’s version will be curated by 20,000 authors from universities and research institutes contributing to articles in more than 100 disciplines. Scholars boast that having a team of high-quality authors is superior to the freedom of allowing anyone to edit.

“The Chinese Encyclopedia 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, told senior scientists at a meeting at the headquarters of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing on April 12, according to a report on the academy’s website the next day. Access to Wikipedia is partially banned on the Chinese mainland. Most entries on science and technology can be read, but a search for sensitive keywords such as “Dalai Lama” and “Xi Jinping” will result in the connection to the server being lost. Yang told the meeting China was under international pressure and felt an urgent need to produce its own encyclopedia to “guide and lead the public and society.”
 
Megalith said:
On a scale of 1 to 10, how biased and censored do you think China’s version of Wikipedia will be? This will actually be an online version of the country’s official encyclopedia, cleverly named “Chinese Encyclopedia,” and unlike everyone’s favorite stateside online compendium, China’s version will be curated by 20,000 authors from universities and research institutes contributing to articles in more than 100 disciplines. Scholars boast that having a team of high-quality authors is superior to the freedom of allowing anyone to edit.

“The Chinese Encyclopedia 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, told senior scientists at a meeting at the headquarters of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing on April 12, according to a report on the academy’s website the next day. Access to Wikipedia is partially banned on the Chinese mainland. Most entries on science and technology can be read, but a search for sensitive keywords such as “Dalai Lama” and “Xi Jinping” will result in the connection to the server being lost. Yang told the meeting China was under international pressure and felt an urgent need to produce its own encyclopedia to “guide and lead the public and society.”
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Just a guess, but I would say that the chances of bias and censorship is 100%. This competes with the newly created arena of "alternative facts". :D
 
I'm sure China's version of Wikipedia will have notable bias. But the original Wikipedia already does have massive bias, and the moderation of it is a partisan clique, so China's version won't be any different in that regard, and will likely be more suitable for Chinese and Eastern audiences. Wikipedia itself is a propaganda outlet that uses tag-teaming groups to collectively remove representation of all sorts of information, and has admins on speed-dial to ban people who try to add certain information to many political subjects. It's a farce website as an encyclopedia and a source for truth in important subjects, though it is good for looking up general information quickly on non-sensitive topics.

There is actually a large chance that China's version of Wikipedia will be less biased than the original Wikipedia.
 
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captainyarr said:
Wikipedia is already biased & run by SJW propagandists. So this couldn't be much worse.
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I'm sure it could be worse on certain topics, and better on others.

shansoft said:
uh what?
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Look up a highly political topic, or even just a person/place/event that has been in the news in the past few years. You'll likely find a very revisionist and slanted viewpoint of the subject. Then dig a little deeper into the edit history and discussion sections of the topic (which a normal user never sees) and you'll find an entire web of power hungry wiki contributors that oust people that aren't like minded; not to mention grammar/writing-style/paragraph-length nazis. Which of course pushes out more casual contributors who may extremely knowledgeable of the given topic. Then you have many extremely niche subjects where it is just a corporate/government/tourism mouthpiece painting the picture as gleefully as possible for themselves.
 
It'll be interesting to see how what we won't find on it.

"Chinese Annex of Tibet" - topic not found.
"Dalai Lama" - topic not found.
"Democracy" - topic not found.
and so on and so on....
 
This will be about as truthful as a Presidential news release. (not picking on T, I mean any President or politician in general)
 
Pros: funded by Chinese government, emphasis on attracting scholars for writing articles

Cons: overseen by the Chinese government,
 
Does someone have a specific example of bias on wikipedia? I'm interested.
 
Krab said:
Does someone have a specific example of bias on wikipedia? I'm interested.
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This is the most infamous one, where a lot of these people ended up exposing themselves. After "pro" GG people started digging, they discovered many other similar circumstances that didn't get nearly as much press. Their editing of this particular article was just so heavy handed it became laughable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy


The Gamergate controversy concerns issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture, stemming from a harassment campaign conducted primarily through the use of the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate. Gamergate is used as a blanket term for the controversy, the harassment campaign and actions of those participating in it, and the loosely organized movement that emerged from the hashtag.
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They fail to even mention the mass coordination of "gamers are dead" articles that all hit within 48hours of each other, or really anything remotely against the media and their slander campaign; just admission that their collusion mailing list existed, while spending a paragraph passing it off as nothing.

Someone who isn't familiar with the details of the series of events would have an extremely skewed opinion of what happened. When I read other articles I'm not familiar with now wonder how much of the story I'm actually getting.

The edit history of the page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gamergate_controversy&dir=prev&limit=250&action=history



You get to see the back and forth between editors, Over a 1,000 edits back and forth in a one week span, just posting a tiny bit of it, its the most passive aggressive set of text messages ever:

>There's nothing in the source about "left-wing ideology." Include Kotaku's refutation of this claim.)

>(of course there is, also you deleted whole other amount of information that was unrelated to the part you claimed isn't in the article, and which made more NPOV article, Anyway I added quote from the The Guardian you want.)

>Nothing in Breitbart can be used to support any claim about a living person. Doesn't matter that Al Jazeera put his tweet in a list.)

>(Um, no, First of all, we cannot describe someone as a "social justice warrior" - that is a pejorative, non-self-applied term. Second of all, the accusations have been laid by many others than just feminists.)

>(add more from the Guardian to present both sides of the story. Currently most of it here are allegations of harassment)

>(Reverted 1 edit by NorthBySouthBaranof: Cite a source for that, and add a sentence saying it is. I can't find any sources that do such. You're cutting out the other half and this is not appreciated. (TW))

>(Reverted 1 edit by NorthBySouthBaranof (talk): Doesn't matter, that's what the source calls it. We go by what the sources state. (TW))

>>(Well, no. We don't use POV terms unchallenged. Find a way to write it so it's not in Wikipedia's voice.)

>(Changed protection level of GamerGate: Edit warring / content dispute: Edit warring with possible WP:BLP implications. ([Edit=Allow only administrators] (expires 17:12, 14 September 2014 (UTC)) [Move=Allow only administrator)[/I]


For reference, from another site which has the list of "gamers are dead" articles that are never mentioned in the wikipedia article:

http://thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewiki/index.php?title=Gamers_Are_Dead (16 articles)

Here's an article where wikipedia / media then tried to make it out like the pro-GG people were trying to take over wikipedia:

http://www.slate.com/articles/techn..._a_bad_source_made_wikipedia_wrong_about.html

with this interesting snippet:

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. The rule of Wikipedia is that authority trumps accuracy. Editors are not allowed to contradict what established “reliable” sources like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian say, lest editors be accused of dreaded “original research” (a big no-no on Wikipedia). Philip Roth found this out when he tried to correct an error about one of his own books, only to be told by a Wikipedia administrator, “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work, but we require secondary sources.” Wikipedia has a policy of “Verifiability, not truth,” which means that citations, even wrong citations, trump all else.
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I got kicked out of the Chinese Student Association at UW-Milwaukee where I mentored doctorate/master students in english (while getting teaching degree in social studies) for our debate on "did China invade Tibet" which my capstone paper was on Tibet. Needless to say, I don't trust that this will be credible/accurate except in the eyes of glorifying communism where needed or bending facts to manipulate history to control people... then there will be 90% credible info (science etc) but there will be tons of re-writing of facts/history.
 
Krab said:
Does someone have a specific example of bias on wikipedia? I'm interested.
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How much propaganda happens in this country. It's all propaganda then add in a publicly editable service managed by volunteers. All those edits and those volunteers are functioning altruistically? The question is how bad is it.
 
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