Baidu's alternative Wikipedia
From Virtual China: Baidu, China's leading search engine, has launched the Baidu Encyclopedia ((百度百科), according to China Web2.0 Review. As of 7:30 today it had 2768 articles written; at 7:51 it had 2909...you can see the articles piling up before your eyes. The intro says: Baidu is in line with the equal, cooperative, and sharing spirit of the Internet...it provides a stage for Internet users' creativity.
Since Wikipedia is blocked in China, we'll see just how creative Baidu writers can actually get.
And a reader asks: How can you edit it this way? What if there's a mistake? How reliable is this encyclopedia?
Random survey of articles written in last few minutes:
- dictionary definition of the word 赫然 (hèrán)
- "setting standards" for Baidu Encyclopedia's characters
- BitTorrent
- a popular dance
- more on editing standards
- population, zip codes, area of all counties within city of Ganzhou
- amber
- failure modes and effects analysis
- more on editing standards
- diamonds
"Baidu Baike does not mention Taiwan, Tibet, democracy, human rights, or any of the controversial topics besetting modern China. Nor, it's been noted, is it neutral when compared with Wikipedia. For example, it paints a very biased picture of Chinese historical figures such as Mao Zedong, forgetting to tell its users of the seventy million Chinese citizens who died as a result of Mao's actions and policies "
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