Baidu’s wikipedia: review

Chinese blogger Xu Jie says Baidu’s Baike wikipedia (see earlier post on its launch) is a disappointment:

Baidu’s Baike [an alternate Chinese wikipedia] has finally formally launched.  but it’s nothing to get excited about…I looked around a bit and most of the articles are naked plagiarism.  They’ve hypocritically put links to reference material at the bottom…Basically there’s little of value here. When I looked carefully, this is the copyright contract: “Baidu owns all of the copyrights to material found on this website.”  How shameless. 

As of 2:24 PST today, the site has over 48,000 articles.  I looked a bit more closely into some of the people who are ‘writing” the articles. I found that at least one of the most prolific authors seems to be posting articles out of another encyclopedia, as evidenced by the orderly entry of a series of articles all of which began with the Chinese word “two” 二.

Could be a nice place for Chinese net users to find encyclopedia entries, but might not be a site for collective knowledge generation as Wikipedia is.

link (in Chinese)