China is Recruiting 20,000 People To Write Its Own Wikipedia (vice.com) 88
The Chinese government is recruiting 20,000 people to create an online encyclopedia that will be the country's own, China-centric version of Wikipedia, or as one official put it, like "a Great Wall of culture." From a report: Known as the "Chinese Encyclopedia," the country's national encyclopedia will go online for the first time in 2018, and the government has employed tens of thousands of scholars from universities and research institutes who will contribute articles in more than 100 disciplines. The end result will be a knowledge base with more than 300,000 entries, each of which will be about 1,000 words long. "The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture," Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project and the chairman of the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, said. He added that China was under pressure from the international community to produce an encyclopedia that will "guide and lead the public and society."
50 cent army (Score:3)
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International community my ass (Score:2, Insightful)
China believes it is the only legitimate country on Earth and behaves accordingly.
Re:Great way to start an encyclopedia... (Score:5, Interesting)
I for one am very excited to read their pages on Tibet and Falun Gong.
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There won't be any. Because those things don't exist. That's what the Memory Hole is for.
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What are you talking about? Tibet exists. It's a region of China. It has always been this way since the time of Confucius.
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On Falun Gong, it will say it is a cult.... because it is. Excuse China for having a low tolerance for cults.
The last time they let a cult go out of control (when a dude claimed he was Jesus reincarnate), it resulted in more deaths than any war in human history until that point (around the time of US civil war, only 20-30 times the deaths). If US had a cult based civil war of this magnitude, it would have shaped its world view as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Cults are to China as Fascism is to the
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I am not defending any "hypocrisy from authority" from a semi-totalitarian state nor am I suggesting perfect equivalence between anything - analogies, after all, can only go so far.
From what I recall from several decades ago, persecution started when Falun Gong did a large scale demonstration in the public spaces. This was seen as a flexing of muscle and the one-party establishment immediately recognized their potential for political organization and was alarmed, especially when it was jittery in the wake o
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Besides the Taiping Rebellion, there was the cult of Mao and the Great Leap Forward famine [npr.org] which also killed about 20 million people...
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MS Encarta.cn? (Score:2)
Serious question (Score:3, Funny)
Will it have hookers and blackjack?
Newspeak Dictionary... I mean, Encyclopedia (Score:1)
The Chinese government feeling they need to create their own new encyclopedia to "guide the people" immediately reminds me of them making the new edition of the Newspeak Dictionary from 1984...
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No. Mao was counter-revolutionary.
And it will be a monumental work of fiction (Score:1, Troll)
I do look forward to the time when China can grow up and face it's real history.
You get U.S. history, warts and all as a freshman in college.
It's kinda painful how ignorant of U.S. history people with a high school degree can be at times.
Then picture a billion chinese with a similar depth of knowledge about their countries history (even recent stuff).
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But these blue pills are sugar coated! Yum yum, a false reality, yum yum.
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I appreciate the moderation war going on over this comment posted above:
I do look forward to the time when China can grow up and face it's real history.
You get U.S. history, warts and all as a freshman in college.
It's kinda painful how ignorant of U.S. history people with a high school degree can be at times.
Then picture a billion chinese with a similar depth of knowledge about their countries history (even recent stuff).
---
I mean, it's likely that china has rooms full of people who's job it is to manage wo
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You get U.S. history, warts and all as a freshman in college.
Let me know when they teach that the aggressors of the war of independence or the civil war were not necessarily the good guys.
When they compare Lincoln's treatment of the Confederacy (half a million dead) to Mikhail Gorbachev's allowing the Baltic states to secede.
Or the annexation of Hawaii to the annexation of Crimea?
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Uh. Dude. They do.
They also talk about how we violated the white flag of peaceful parley in the phillipines and the various problems our founding fathers had. And how we experimented on black men- denying them treatment for syphilis.
And yup- also go into how we had federal troops help with the annexation of Hawaii.
Now- as to Crimea- if we were still in the 18th century, there would be no problem. But the world passed a set of laws prohibiting taking territory that way since then. And in a world with n
zh.wikipedia.org (Score:1)
....it already exists, and they are free to write/edit it themselves
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....it already exists, and they are free to write/edit it themselves
Wikipedia is hosted outside China, and they are NOT free to edit it because many controversial topics are locked or the "alternative truth" is quickly reverted.
They can use zh.wikipedia.org as a starting point, but if they want a PC encyclopedia, they will have to write their own.
Re:zh.wikipedia.org (Score:4, Interesting)
NO. They will not have to write their own.
Most articles are not controversial at all, and they will just sync them with Wikipedia. They can even do a real time sync, so that when Chinese editors update their version the updates go straight to Wikipedia.
The controversial articles will be home grown. But that is only a small fraction of the total.
That is the Archillies heal of Wikipedia. It can be selectively and repeatably forked. I see Russian and Turkish versions very soon.
He who controls the past controls the future...
Only 20,000, that's efficient (Score:1)
There are over 30,000 registered users in the English Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
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All Glory to the Hypnotoad! (Score:2)
they are getting prepared (Score:1)
Re:they are getting prepared FTFY (Score:2)
as history is continually rewritten by the victors
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Sad (Score:2)
What else is there to say?
Maybe Maduro can get some of his better fed Chavistas to make a Bolivarian wikipedia and spare us all our misguided views about the fabulous success of the revolution.
Revisionism: Chinese Ultimate Edition (Score:1)
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Nothing we haven't seen before.
"We built the biggest and best wall, everybody knows it. We know walls, we've been doing them for thousands of years. Our wall is so yuuuge you can see it from space, and it works because, let me tell you, WE are still here and the looosers wiped out. Bing bam boom, Gone!"
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It's all good unless they start insisting still that the Chinese race is a direct descendant from the Chinese Homo Erectus. You know, to feel special and different from the rest and clearly a "superior" race. Hopefully they at least inspect the results before publishing the work to prevent the writers from pushing their own agendas and superstitions.
What license ? (Score:2)
and who will be able to update pages ?
Sure. (Score:2)
And then they'll have to retract [slashdot.org] half of it...
Wikipedia (Score:3)
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If they're using the wikipedia model, I expect their volunteer contributors will dwindle once the government starts imprisoning authors of edits they don't like.
Volunteers will be selected and they will all be working willingly even if they aren't
I found the prototype! (Score:2)
Navigate to http://permission/ [permission] Denied].cn
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Don't be silly. That's just Western revisionism. There was no Great Leap forward and no one ever starved.
a competition (Score:2)
Old is new (Score:3, Informative)
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Please provide links to support this. From what I've read there was no such fleet (may just be my ignorance though) and I've never heard of these encyclopaedias being distributed, and I'd be damn disappointed if LdV got so much from China without credit being fairly attributed. Links pls.
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Marxapedia (Score:3)
So now we'll have marxapedia to contrast with conservapedia..
A fitting addition to the age of Fake News and Alternative Facts.
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So now we'll have marxapedia to contrast with conservapedia..
A fitting addition to the age of Fake News and Alternative Facts.
History is written by the winner, or something.
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So now we'll have marxapedia to contrast with conservapedia..
A fitting addition to the age of Fake News and Alternative Facts.
More likely to be a chinese translation of conservapedia rather than a communist counter-point. What they will be denying due to conservative double-think is just different things, like the existence of Taiwan, that China has ever been split into multiple warring parts, that Tibet has ever been independent, etc.
Reinvented Nupedia (Score:2)
That isn't how Wikipedia works; that's how Nupedia worked [wikipedia.org].
Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars (ideally with PhDs) to volunteer content. Before it ceased operating, Nupedia produced 25 approved articles that had completed its review process (three articles also existed in two versions of different lengths), and 74 more articles were in progress
If they want their own Wikipedia, they can't be restricting the pool of authors and trying to exercise top-down control on the content. OTOH, if they want Nupedia, they are on the right track.
Nupedia was designed by committee, with experts to predefine the rules, and it approved only 21 articles in its first year, compared to Wikipedia posting 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year
Good luck with that, China.