Baidu’s alternative Wikipedia
Posted on by Lyn Jeffery
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
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