China and Taiwan Clash Over Wikipedia Edits (bbc.com) 84
Ask Google or Siri: "What is Taiwan?" "A state", they will answer, "in East Asia". But earlier in September, it would have been a "province in the People's Republic of China." From a report: For questions of fact, many search engines, digital assistants and phones all point to one place: Wikipedia. And Wikipedia had suddenly changed. The edit was reversed, but soon made again. And again. It became an editorial tug of war that - as far as the encyclopedia was concerned -- caused the state of Taiwan to constantly blink in and out of existence over the course of a single day. "This year is a very crazy year," sighed Jamie Lin, a board member of Wikimedia Taiwan. "A lot of Taiwanese Wikipedians have been attacked." Wikipedia is a movement as much as a website. Anyone can write or edit entries on Wikipedia, and in almost every country on Earth, communities of "Wikipedians" exist to protect and contribute to it. The largest collection of human knowledge ever amassed, available to everyone online for free, it is arguably the greatest achievement of the digital age. But in the eyes of Lin and her colleagues, it is now under attack.
The edit war over Taiwan was only one of a number that had broken out across Wikipedia's vast, multi-lingual expanse of entries. The Hong Kong protests page had seen 65 changes in the space of a day -- largely over questions of language. Were they protesters? Or rioters? The English entry for the Senkaku islands said they were "islands in East Asia," but earlier this year the Mandarin equivalent had been changed to add "China's inherent territory." The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were changed in Mandarin to describe them as "the June 4th incident" to "quell the counter-revolutionary riots". On the English version, the Dalai Lama is a Tibetan refugee. In Mandarin, he is a Chinese exile. Angry differences of opinion happen all the time on Wikipedia. But to Ms Lin, this was different. "It's control by the [Chinese] Government" she continued. "That's very terrible." BBC Click's investigation has found almost 1,600 tendentious edits across 22 politically sensitive articles. We cannot verify who made each of these edits, why, or whether they reflect a more widespread practice. However, there are indications that they are not all necessarily organic, nor random. Both an official and academics from within China have begun to call for both their government and citizens to systematically correct what they argue are serious anti-Chinese biases endemic across Wikipedia.
The edit war over Taiwan was only one of a number that had broken out across Wikipedia's vast, multi-lingual expanse of entries. The Hong Kong protests page had seen 65 changes in the space of a day -- largely over questions of language. Were they protesters? Or rioters? The English entry for the Senkaku islands said they were "islands in East Asia," but earlier this year the Mandarin equivalent had been changed to add "China's inherent territory." The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were changed in Mandarin to describe them as "the June 4th incident" to "quell the counter-revolutionary riots". On the English version, the Dalai Lama is a Tibetan refugee. In Mandarin, he is a Chinese exile. Angry differences of opinion happen all the time on Wikipedia. But to Ms Lin, this was different. "It's control by the [Chinese] Government" she continued. "That's very terrible." BBC Click's investigation has found almost 1,600 tendentious edits across 22 politically sensitive articles. We cannot verify who made each of these edits, why, or whether they reflect a more widespread practice. However, there are indications that they are not all necessarily organic, nor random. Both an official and academics from within China have begun to call for both their government and citizens to systematically correct what they argue are serious anti-Chinese biases endemic across Wikipedia.
Just stick with the facts (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia editors should make sure pages stick with the facts, and lock them down if necessary.
Something like "Taiwan is a disputed territory. China claims it is a province but is recognized as an independent country by 19 UN member nations."
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Taiwan isn't disputed. The mainland is!
Re:Just stick with the facts (Score:5, Insightful)
Taiwan isn't disputed. The mainland is!
Technically it is all disputed, and for a long time both countries claimed to be the legitimate government ruling over all China. In reality though, they are basically two separate countries in all practice now. China would love to conquer and occupy Taiwan (and no-doubt will one day), China is like the European powers in the 1700's laying claim to everything and trying to expand as much as possible.
And of course, China, not content to just police and censor their own shut-off internet want to censor the world's internet too.
Re:Just stick with the facts (Score:5, Interesting)
Taiwan IS and considered by the large majority of states in the world to be considered part of China.
The only reason it isn't officially recognized as independent (even though it is treated as such) by the majority of states is to be on good terms with China. Just because they haven't officially recognized Taiwan as not being subject to China does not mean that most peoples around the world don't recognize Taiwan's sovereignty unofficially.
Take the US for example, the US doesn't officially recognize Taiwan as sovereign, but at the same time the US has a treaty guaranteeing defense of Taiwan should China try and force Taiwan to submit with force. (Not that a treaty signed by the US really means anything anymore)
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Indeed. If you are forced to choose, it's better to piss off your little neighbor than your big neighbor.
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How about have the introduction mention the classification is disputed by many nations, and have a hyperlink to a table showing which nations recognize Taiwan as a country, as an independent province, as a territory of mainland China, etc.
As far as Taiwan's claim to mainland China, they are the only ones who "recognize" that. It's a silly ego game between both sides.
Taiwan is a de-facto country whether anybody wants them to be or not. Short of a very nasty* war, it will stay that way into the foreseeable f
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It's not mutually exclusive.
That group lost the war for control of the mainland but won't admit it. You can use history all you want to verbally claim land, but possession is possession. Sorry, but cannons beat words and beat historical tradition. (I'm not saying it's justified, just talking practicalities of existence.)
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If enough time goes by with nobody of significance making a big deal out of it, they indeed would generally be considered in China's de-facto possession.
Again, I'm not putting a value judgement on such, only saying that's the usual behavior.
And whether that applies to houses is a different matter. Houses are not islands. I imaging such depends on local laws and/or tradition. I do know California house transfers require a signature(s). I can't speak for other territories.
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Correction: "imaging" should be "imagine".
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Well both are. The PRC and the ROC both claim Taiwan.
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I would have a problem with your "fact" that "Taiwan is a province of China". Hence the discussion.
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Taiwan wouldn't.
Provided that the government of mainland China ceased to exist and the Taiwanese government took over, of course.
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No, actually you are just really bad at making a clear point. Typical Millennial.
There is no such thing as "facts". That's the prob (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, you can say "I observed something that I call the sun. I observed it to be what I call bright."
But that won't work with things that are entirely made-up by humans. Like the concept of a country. ... definition. (You see the problem?)
You can use perfect logic, and still end up with different results, because it is based on definitions, which are arbitrary by
Hell, even for basic things like "Which event happened first?", measured scientifically, we know situations where different measurers get conflicting results!
Yet the casual layman and even pretend-scientist with no background in the most fundamental physics, neurology and philosophy, will go on acting as if and believing there *must* be *one* version that is "fact".
That is why Wikipedia's fallacy of absolutism is its downfall. It is defective by design. And deliberately so.
In this case, all we can do is make an arbitrary definition that feels right to us, but not necessarily to anyone else. And we are not "more equal", so we can not claim being more right.
E.g. "The only person who gets to decide what country he is part of, is the person itself."
INB4 getting downvoted by people who simply can't accept it, believe I sided with their pet enemy (I didn't.), and don't have the background. ... I get ya, but *please* get a real education before getting an opinion.
Re:There is no such thing as "facts". That's the p (Score:5, Interesting)
That is why Wikipedia's fallacy of absolutism is its downfall. It is defective by design. And deliberately so
If you read Wikipedia's policy on Neutral point of view, [wikipedia.org] you'll see it's the opposite of absolute facts. When there's a disagreement like this one, the editorial policy is to present to readers all relevant positions in a language as aseptic as possible.
Something else is how well the policy is implemented for a particular article. That's open to debate, and anyone with a complaint can debate it at the article's collaborative Talk page.
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I would love to agree with you, however politicians will disagree with "the facts" - China will say that it is not disputed that Taiwan is anything other than a province. You might point to people who dispute their view, they will simply say that this is "fake news" (or something) put about by a few dissidents who just want to cause problems.
Sad to say but lying is a tool used commonly by politicians, diplomats, business leaders, ... They generally get away with it. Us techies will get into big trouble if w
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I see now! They both claim something different, but they both agree that there is no dispute. Sorry, this level of illogic took a lot of mental work for me to wrap my head around it. This amount of cognitive dissonance is curiously painful.
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Something like "Taiwan is a disputed territory. China claims it is a province but is recognized as an independent country by 19 UN member nations."
Even that simple, common sense approach to defining things is incredibly problematic.
1) Merely acknowledging that there is a dispute is to acknowledge that there are two sides, which are fighting words as far as the mainland is concerned, since they hold that there is only one China.
2) Taiwan considers itself the legitimate Chinese government in exile, so saying that "China" claims it as a province is to deny that the Taiwanese are "China".
3) Recognition by UN member nations doesn't mean much. Recall that T
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You would think that a neutral POV policy would have them do just that. In reality, they're taking sides and making political statements and not getting flagged as such.
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Only the mainland is disputing Taiwan's status and that's because the CCP has not legitimacy. The last thing they want is nation of free Chinese lest their own locals decide maybe they'd like to be free of the CCP.
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Not 19, but 14 now, and quickly dwindling.
None of these countries recognize Taiwan as an independent nation.
What they recognize is Taiwan's claim to be the legitimate sovereign government of all of China.
And Mongolia too. PRC recognizes Mongolia as an independent nation, but ROC does not.
Fuck China (Score:1, Troll)
Seriously, fuck them.
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Oh yeah? Check under your keyboard, under your computer, your eBay account... all made in China!
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So? With some effort I can find non-Chinese replacements.
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All of them?
I command your dedication, but ... ain't that chafing?
Needs 3rd party adjudication (Score:1)
"anti-Chinese biases" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a bias against China or the Chinese, it's just reality.
People who aren't Chinese aren't subjected to constant brainwashing by the CCP, so they don't insist on ridiculous and provably false things like Taiwan being part of the PRC.
There is no real debate on these issues outside of China / the Chinese expat community.
Re:"anti-Chinese biases" (Score:5, Insightful)
People who aren't Chinese aren't subjected to constant brainwashing by the CCP, so they don't insist on ridiculous and provably false things
Well... we kind of are though, but to a lesser degree. Hollywood won't say anything offensive about China anymore because they're scared of losing sales in China. Corporations have to watch their twitter feed because if they say something that goes against the Chinese narrative they get cut off in China.
Heck recently some owner of an American sports team made some comment about "protesters" in China and China didn't like the term protesters so now that sports team is barred from Chinese television.
China is a big powerful market, and we're slowly becoming influenced by their censorship because corporations in the West are fearful of losing access to them. China's censorship BS is slowly becoming more influential on us.
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Welcome to the club. Europe has had the same thing from the United States. TV shows censored to meet US standards, and their running time cut short to 45 minutes so American networks can show 15 minutes of adverts.
It used to be a lot worse but now that cable TV in the US seems to be able to show pretty much anything it's less of an issue, at least on the censorship front. Run time is still affected, except if it's a partnership with Netflix.
Re:"anti-Chinese biases" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the same thing. Europe co's edited or altered TV content because they wanted to sell their shows to private US TV broadcasters, not because of pressure from the US gov't to control political messaging. (The US gov't may impose rules such as "no boobs", but that's to cater to US voter tastes, and had nothing to do with influencing Europe.)
It's been that way for melania: If you wanted to sell in Rome, you had to market to Romans, not your local market. It's similar to why products are often designed for right-handers: there's often not enough market for left-handers to justify a custom factory run.
But what's at issue is the Chinese gov't itself pressuring content producers to not bad-mouth the Chinese gov't. That's different than the market-size issue.
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What does the con artist's third wife, the one he's had multiple affairs on, have to do with this?
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Ah lovely Modnays
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It went wrong when the world accepted the "One China" policy for dealing with the PRC and Taiwan: having only one of them accepted into the UN (worse; kicking out Taiwan in favor of the PRC), diplomatic relations with only one of PRC|Taiwan, etc.
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Authoritarians like their censorship and want to see it in use all around the internet.
FTFY
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its not "Authoritarians"...
Re:"anti-Chinese biases" (Score:4, Informative)
The C in CPC is.....
its not "Authoritarians"...
Censorship is not limited to, nor a basic requirement of, a communist government. It is, however, frequently used by authoritarian governments.
The political spectrum is multi-axis. You are concerning yourself only with the Y-axis (right-left) while censorship is a function of the X-axis(authoritarian/libertarian). Censorship would be on "positive" (up) end of the axis while something like the 1st Amendment would be on the "negative" (down) end.
This is partly why you keep getting those idiots who try to claim the NSDAP was socialist (left) when they are really comparing authoritarian (up) traits. The other part is that they're idiots.
Communism requires authoritarianism (Score:2)
Communism and authoritarian are not the same thing, that is true.
Looking around at communist countries, we see they are all authoritarian. Why? Because authoritarian is a *prerequisite* for communism. You can't have a communist country without if being authoritarian.
The definition of Communism is that "the people collectively", through their leaders (the politicians), decide what you can make, sell, and buy. Of course if there are more than about 24 people in the country, they aren't democratically votin
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Given the definition of a communist country - a country in which the government controls everything anyone can make, or any service they can perform to earn money - it's silly to suggest that communist doesn't have anything to do with government control.
I didn't say that. I said censorship wasn't a prerequisite for or a guaranteed outcome of communism. It tends to happen because that's the only effective, non-murdery way of suppressing complaints that inevitably rise up due to the inherent inefficiency of communism.
Really, as you allude to, communism doesn't scale. It's a great idea in small, like-minded groups but it quickly reaches a critical mass since pure communism at the state scale generally leads to mass poverty and a small wealthy government/pa
Nazi party changed (Score:2)
> This is partly why you keep getting those idiots who try to claim the NSDAP was socialist (left) when they are really comparing authoritarian (up) traits. The other part is that they're idiots.
Well and because it was the National SOCIALIST WORKERS Party.
Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric, although this was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders, and in the 1930s the party's main focus shifted to anti-Semitic an
Re:Nazi party changed (Score:4, Informative)
Well and because it was the National SOCIALIST WORKERS Party.
Do you argue the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is a democracy because "Democratic" is in the name?
Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric, although this was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders, and in the 1930s the party's main focus shifted to anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist themes.
Initially they were also simply called the DAP. They added the "socialist" part to try to bring in more left wing supporters to broaden their base. But they were already anti-Marxist and often (physically) fought with the German communist party.
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They weren't National Socialists JUST because they had it in their name. They were National Socialists because they were Nationalists that did Socialist things.
Some of the National Socialist's social economic policies:
Strong capital controls on banks
Legal limits on profit margins
Requiring companies to hire works as directed by the government
Preventing workers from being fired without government approval
Laws preventing transfer of wealth to outside of Germany
Requiring wages be linked to corporate revenue
Lar
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And the D in USA stands for democracy. As much as the R is for republican. Just like they did in the GDR, the German Democratic Republic.
Names are bullshit. Not words but actions matter.
Chinese ultranationalists (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'm trying to say is if accuracy is the goal then that's probably not a great idea
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Not ever riot is unjustified. As it not every revolution.
Words are just that. Words. Context gives them meaning.
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Anyone being oppressed is one person too many. No matter where. Just because things are worse in North Korea doesn't mean the Chinese get a free pass.
Re:No Face (Score:4, Interesting)
China has no face, no honor.
Pathetic culture at this point.
I couldn't disagree more. I am a huge critic of how their imperialistic government runs and their human rights abuses; but they are a really important nation leading the way in many new technological advances as the West drops the ball and has lowered science funding. They've done a lot to invest in mass transit, clean energy, and the welfare of their poor.
China, like all countries, has good points and bad points.
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Yeah ive been there. No face.
Are you sure you don't have Prosopagnosia? :)
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A bigger problem is that the family name (surname) is very important in Chinese tradition, and only males can carry it on. Thus, female babies are more likely to be aborted, or families keep having children until they have a male. This results in less females in the population. The Chinese gov't has even considered tax-breaks for having females to reduce this practice.
(As a side non-PC comment, Asian women are indeed hot.)
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Traditionally (not sure that it is always so anymore), the son and his wife were obligated to take care of the man's parents as they aged, but not the woman's parents.
A son means you will be looked after in your old age, a daughter offered no such guarantee. Naturally, if you could only have one child, you'd want a son.
Only ONE person gets to have a say... (Score:2)
The person living there!
(And only about his own home too.)
Everything else is dictatorship and a crime.
It's like those who want to tell you what you can and cannot do to your OWN damn body.
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Jinping agrees with you and declares that he is the ONE person whose say matters. Everyone else can be reeducated.
Ob. Pink Floyd (Score:2)
"Haven't you heard, it's a battle of words?" the poster-bearer cried.
--Roger Waters, 1973
The Bleeding Obvious (Score:4, Informative)
Of course. We in the west are the world experts in propaganda, by a mile, and we have a lot of experience in twisting wikipedia content in a very multilayered manner. The concept of reliable sources is important. Once you can control who is considered reliable then the whole system follows you. ,and the other way round for the pro war voices. I say systematically though the changes were embedded in large amounts of 'neutral edits'.
It is interesting to look at the Philip Cross case ( https://wikipedia.fivefilters.... [fivefilters.org] ), where a senior Wikipedia editor over a decade systematically tweaked the pages of antiwar voices and leftist voices to minimize their reliability
He's back at it btw, after a temporary ban.
That is how Wikipedia gets our kind of bias while maintaining an aura of neutrality: our mainstream media are reliable and get space at wikipedia, theirs are not and they do not get space.
So while the propaganda war on Hong Kong is generally very one sided, what is new is that China attempts to respond. They will soon bump into the many layers of defense.
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I'm not sure why they wouldn't just redirect to BaiduPedia.cn or whatever. Are they not already doing that behind the great firewall? They are blocking a bunch of other web sites, if not Wikipedia.
To me this seems to be a progression from internal propaganda within Chinese borders, to offensive propaganda targeted at foreigners.
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Taiwan, foreigners? To them it is still an internal issue.
Re: The Bleeding Obvious (Score:2)
Most Wikipedia readers are not in Taiwan.
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I don't think they're talking about en.wikipedia.org.
Submission is wrong (Score:2)
If you ask Siri “what is Taiwan”, there’s a good chance the response will be “here’s what I found on the web regarding ‘what is Taiwan’”.
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If you ask Siri “what is Taiwan”, there’s a good chance the response will be “here’s what I found on the web regarding ‘what is Taiwan’”.
If I ask Alexa "what is Taiwan", it will probably give me the weather forecast for London.
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My main takeaway from this is: don't ask Siri anything. That's the easy part!
Second takeaway: Double-check whatever you read on Wikipedia.
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Getting the facts straight (Score:2)