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It won't last, at least for China. Their government is working on a clone of wiki, scheduled for 2018[0]. Once that's done they'll likely completely ban the or
by shpx 9y ago
It won't last, at least for China. Their government is working on a clone of wiki, scheduled for 2018[0]. Once that's done they'll likely completely ban the original.
Wikipedia publishes database dumps every couple of days[1]. So it shouldn't be that expensive for smaller governments to create and host their own censored mirror. You'd maintain a list of banned and censored articles, then pull from wikipedia once a month. You'd have to check new articles by hand (maybe even all edits), but a lot of that should be easily automated, and if you only care about wikipedia in your native tongue (and it's not english) that's much less work.
The academics will bypass censorship anyway, since it's so easy[2], so an autocrat won't worry about intellectually crippling their country by banning wikipedia. Maybe they don't do this because the list of banned articles would be trivial to get.
Better machine translation might solve this by helping information flow freely[3]. We have until 2018 I guess.
[0] https://news.vice.com/story/china-is-recruiting-20000-people-to-write-its-own-wikipedia https://news.vice.com/story/china-is-recruiting-20000-people...
[1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html
[2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-great-firewall-censorship-fang-binxing https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-great-firewall-censors...
[3] https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/12/17/anti-wikipedian-translation-at-chinas-internet-conference/ https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/12/17/anti-wikipedi...
- wfunction 9y agoWhy hasn't it been done yet? It's not like Wikipedia is a new thing.
- imron 9y agoBaidupedia has been around for nearly a decade.
- wodenokoto 9y agoI thought China already blocked https, so switching to https only would effectively ban/block wikipedia.
- bartread 9y agoI don't believe so. I just tested one of my own websites, which only serves over HTTPS, from Hong Kong (admittedly a special case), and Beijing. It worked fine from both. Surprisingly, because I thought Adsense was blocked, an advert even appeared on the Beijing screenshot. On the other hand, it reported as temporarily unavailable from Shanghai. I was using https://www.dotcom-tools.com/website-speed-test.aspx?se=14030f0be58a42b4b83609b7edd1520a https://www.dotcom-tools.com/website-speed-test.aspx?se=1403....
- wodenokoto 9y agoOkay, thanks for testing for me. When I lived in Shanghai 5 yrs ago, I had a lot of trouble connecting to https and whenever possible, I would try and connect unencrypted.
- bartread 9y agoThat's interesting. My admittedly flawed understanding is that the Great Firewall of China isn't implemented with a unified set of policies, but rather varies from province to province, which might help explain your experience and my test results.
- Markoff 9y agowut? everyone in China already use Baike instead of Wikipedia, nobody really understand why they are making another website
- runn1ng 9y agoTo compare Chinese Wikipedia has 940,000 articles, baike has 6 million articles.
- dmix 9y agoWikipedia editors are pretty strict about what gets to remain a page. Everyone knows they delete articles unless it has lots of sources and public interest. With 6x the articles on baike I can't imagine that there is that level of quality control. Unless there are 6x as many things worth documenting in China vs rest of the world. An interesting statistic none-the-less.
- chucksmash 9y agoEnglish Wikipedia has 5.4 million articles. I imagine many of them would be notable in Chinese too.
- ttflee 9y agoBaidu Baike has not changed its portrait of bad quality/credibility issue/plagiarism from my memory.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ue_ 9y agoThat doesn't surprise me; in Japan there are various Japanese wiki sites, usually with less information than even the Japanese versions of Wikipedia, but still with more articles. Usually they even have comment sections below the articles, which can become quite toxic, at least on certain articles.
- lactau 9y ago
- Yizahi 9y agoRussia will follow soon. They already heavily editing Russian Wiki for "inconvenient" information.
- thriftwy 9y agoRussian language definitely doesn't belong to Russian Federation the state but to a wide range of Russian-speaking people worldwide. If you see that somebody spins the Russian Wiki, you should definitely try to make it right to the extent suggested by Wikipedia norms.
- Yizahi 9y agoWon't work, they are really closed in moderation. A few years ago they even renamed this article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27) because they have identity crisis - they try to pose as the oldest part of slavic nations, the core nation and therefore must be obeyed (literally). So to shift the history they renamed the article to "Ancient Rus" to make people forget the Kiev part. (not the only thing they do of course) As another exhibit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbass This article in RU denies any involvement of Russia in Russian-Ukrainian war, however weird that may sound. They are either complicit or so deep in denial that it is impossible to talk to them about the war. Currently Russian Wiki segment can't be trusted except for bare facts and non-political entries.
- dbdr 9y ago> A few years ago they even renamed this article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27) [...] to "Ancient Rus" to make people forget the Kiev part. The russian version of that article is currently Киевская Русь [1] (Kievan Rus), though Дре́вняя Русь (Ancient Rus) is listed as a synonym. So it seems that specific change has been reverted, right? [1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B8%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%8C https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B8%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%81...
- 9y ago