china wiki sites ::
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
:: wiki technology makes it possible for anyone who accesses a Web page to edit it, with the objective of the content ultimately improving in accuracy and value over time with ongoing contributions and crowd-sourced collaboration. Wikipedia is of course the most well-known example of a wiki Web site, and has reached its current status as an Internet juggernaut entirely through the collaborative efforts of ordinary Web users. Many wiki options exist for Internet users in mainland China; here are five ways that Chinese netizens use wikis to collaborate on reference Web sites:
1. Wikipedia (维基百科)
The Chinese edition of the site that started it all. Although in the past, Wikipedia was unavailable on the Chinese mainland for long periods of time, all languages are currently accessible (barring the occasional block from a keyword filter). The Chinese-language edition of Wikipedia tries to serve a global audience by providing tools for switching between traditional and simplified characters in a variety of different standards (mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia / Singapore). Other varieties of Chinese have their own smaller Wikipedia editions: Cantonese, Hakka, two forms of Min (form 1, form 2), Shanghainese, and classical Chinese.
2. Wikipedia mirrors
When Chinese Internet users were unable to access information on Wikipedia, a number of Web sites sprang up to bring that information to the Chinese mainland. This is completely legitimate under Wikipedia’s license terms (and is done for the English-language editions by well-known Web sites like Answers.com), although, many mirror sites (镜像站点) push the bounds of taste by loading themselves down with ads, etc. One decent mirror is Wikilib (维库), which preserves the entire edit history of the Wikipedia articles it reproduces. Knowtive (协作百科), started at the beginning of 2008, is more representative of the majority of Wikipedia mirrors in China in that it doesn’t advertise its borrowings to the casual browser.
3. General interest Chinese Wikipedia clones
In addition to straight-up copies of Wikipedia content, China is home to a number of Wikipedia-workalikes. Hudong (互动百科), founded in 2005, bases its online encyclopedia using its own open-source wiki software. Hudong (formerly Hoodong) is the largest Chinese-language online encyclopedia, and site founder Pan Haidong is active in the Web 2.0 scene. The web site is attractively formatted and has a wealth of content. In 2006, search giant Baidu introduced its own service: Baike (百度百科), which has since grown to be second only to Hudong in size. Like other Baidu offerings, it’s fairly bare-bones and provides only minimal styling options. As is common to many general-interest Chinese wikis, much of Baike’s content seems to have been lifted wholesale from other Web sites with only occasional attribution. Another interesting Chinese wiki, the Chinese Network Information Cyclopedia (网络天书), was started in 2003 and has been active since then, but has not grown as swiftly as its competitors. Aiming to be a more complete compendium of information than a mere encyclopedia, it offers a joke archive, bilingual word lists, and dialect glossaries.
4. IT Wikis
Popular IT portal Donews serves up a wiki that covers the IT sector. The site brings together company profiles, bios of industry leaders, and product and technology descriptions. A similar site is CCW’s iTwiki. Both sites use the same MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia, so Wikipedians will feel right at home editing these articles (after registration; both CCW’s and Donews’ Wikis limit editing to registered users). AllWiki (天下维客) is a more cluttered IT wiki that has a particular focus on wiki technology itself.
5. Special-interest Wikis
All kinds of smaller wikis exist in China for specific topics. Run by enthusiasts, they tend to foster active communities that often interact using other online technologies like blogs, forums, or instant messaging tools. Cinepedia (中文电影百科), launched in late 2006 as Cinewiki, has more than 500 registered users who edit articles about film-related topics. It has a strong community that rewards users with various titles and accolades for their contributions. FoodBK (食品百科), is a food-oriented wiki covers categories ranging from food ingredients, dishes and additives, to packaging and preservation technology. It was developed by the Foodmate BBS, China’s largest online food tech discussion forum, whose members organize themselves via wiki discussion pages and a QQ group to distribute editing tasks.
// AjS
