How the Chinese Wikipedia Differs from the English 193
bulled writes "News.com is running a story on differences found in Wikipedia's Chinese site content, as compared to content on the same subjects from the English site. The article goes into a discussion about how the 'sanitized' information is so prevalent in Chinese education that it is seen as the 'truth'." From the article: "[Some] say the object should be to spread reliable information as widely as possible, and that, in any case, self-censorship is pointless because the government still frequently blocks access to Wikipedia for most Chinese Internet users. 'There is a lot of confusion about whether they should obey the neutral point of view or offer some compromises to the government,' said Isaac Mao, a well-known Chinese blogger and user of the encyclopedia. 'To the local Wikipedians, the first objective is to make it well known among Chinese, to get people to understand the principles of Wikipedia step by step, and not to get the thing blocked by the government.'"
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Same Problems Here (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Most Chinese wikipedia users are not from mainl (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How Is This Related to the US Government??!! (Score:1, Informative)
Politics
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my brother in China (Score:4, Informative)
Re:We have our own socially effected censorship (Score:4, Informative)
Here [wikipedia.org] ya [wikipedia.org] go [wikipedia.org].
Yeah, none of these are opinions, they're stated objectively; that's what Wikipedia's about, isn't it? Surely the difference is that the Chinese Wikipedia (or other information sources) are censoring *objective* facts?
Re:And this is unusual how? (Score:3, Informative)
This is nothing more than a fallacy. First of all, you assume that all the people writing articles on Chinese Wikipedia were born in or live in Mainland China. If you have walked around town -- anywhere in the world -- recently, you would realize that there are a lot of Chinese people outside of China. Many, if not most, of these Chinese people were born outside of China. Further, there are very large populations of Chinese people all throughout South East Asia. Anybody who has been on IRC would know that nearly every Chinese person in South East Asia has a computer. This is not mentioning massive populations of Chinese people in Canada and Australia. I have heard that Vancouver has many areas where only Chinese can be heard on the street.
In short, there are a lot of Chinese people outside of China. As usual with Chinese society (and many others I suppose), these overseas Chinese have a plethora of differing opinions (in fact, even in Chinese culture, I rarely encounter people with anything but dissimilar viewpoints). All of these people are likely to be contributing to Wikipedia. If they are, and their viewpoints are somewhat of a consensus of Chinese world views, maybe Westerners should be looking upon their own news media derived "knowledge" with some skepticism.
In my opinion, the biggest division is caused by encoding systems. The separation of Chinese writing into Simplified and Traditional, and Wikipedia's initial choice to support Simplified as "Chinese" forced one version of people's perception to dominate. However, even though many articles are now in Traditional Chinese, this artificial separation still affects the exchange of information greatly.
The real solution is that software has got to stop treating Simplified and Traditional Chinese as separate languages. Which glyphs are viewed should be a simple matter of user preference. I should never have to see Simplified or Traditional Characters if I do not want to. This way, virtual borders between "Communist China" and "Traditional China" will not exist. Chinese will be one unifying (and unified) writing system again -- as it has been since 221 BC.
Re:Before we get on the high horse here... (Score:3, Informative)