Baidu Baike

Baidu Baike

URL	http://baike.baidu.com/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Owner	Baidu
Created by	Robin Li

Baidu Baike (Chinese: 百度百科; pinyin: bǎidù bǎikē; translation: Baidu Encyclopedia) is a Chinese language collaborative Web-based encyclopedia provided by the Chinese search engine Baidu. It initially prospered in the wake of the blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China on October 19 2005. The test version was released on April 20, 2006, and within three weeks, the encyclopedia had grown to more than 90,000 articles, surpassing that of Chinese Wikipedia. By November 2006, Baidu Baike held more articles than any edition of Wikipedia with the exception of English Wikipedia, rivaling those of German Wikipedia. At that time, its growth rate was approximately 50,000 articles per month.

Baidu Baike is the second largest online Chinese encyclopedia after Hoodong.

Baudu Baike

Conception

Baidu's William Chang said on WWW2008 'No reason for China to use Wikipedia', 'It's very natural for China to make its own products.'

Functions of the website

The site is an open Internet encyclopedia espousing equality, collaboration, and sharing. The encyclopedia, with two other services provided by Baidu ("zhidao" and "post") would form a trinity to complement the search engine.

The articles are written and edited by registered users and reviewed by behind-the-scenes administrators before release. There is no formal way to contact the administrators. Registered users' contributions are rewarded in a credit point system. Although the earlier test version was named "Baidu WIKI," official media releases and pages on the encyclopedia itself state that the system is not a wiki. The site does not use MediaWiki, but it continues to use the "wiki" concept now in reality, one example being in the URL.

Style and interface

The visual style of the encyclopedia is simple. In articles, only boldface and hyperlinks are supported. Comments are listed at the bottom of each page.

Amongst its wiki-like functions, the site supports editing, commenting, and printing of articles, as well as an article history function.

Editing

Users can access multiple extended editing functions, including:

• An image uploading system where files less than 2 MB can be added to articles in the Encyclopedia.
• A keyword tagging system called "open category" (similar to folksonomy). One article can be tagged with at most 5 categories.
• A separate edit box for references and external links.

Principles of the encyclopedia

Articles or comments containing the following types of content would be removed:

1. pornographic or violent text or images
2. advertising
3. personal attacks
4. unethical content
5. malicious, meaningless content

Copyright

Baidu Baike's copyright policy is outlined in the 'terms of use' section of its help page. In it, Baidu Baike states that by adding content to the site, users agree to assign Baidu rights to their original contributions. It also states that users cannot violate intellectual property law, and that contributions which quote works held under the Creative Commons and/or GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) must follow the restrictions of those licenses.

Growth

The number of articles exceeded 10,000 in two days of its launch, and reached 40,000 in six.

Date Number of articles Year 2006 May 5 82,788 May 21 142,283 July 15 283,417 August 4 314,839 September 9 369,700 October 9 428,000 November 15 489,380 December 13 530,636

Date Number of articles Year 2007 January 17 578,752 February 15 622,219 March 17 663,487 April 19 706,080 May 23 735,423 August 6 809,921 September 19 863,307 October 17 892,201 November 26 940,429 December 31 982,619

Date Number of articles Year 2008 January 20 1,004,052 February 20 1,039,906 March 20 1,070,392 April 24 1,115,428 May 27 1,153,565 July 6 1,197,524 September 26 1,286,880 November 22 1,349,621

Criticism

Baidu Baike has been critized for violating the GFDL when using Wikipedia content. The project has been criticized for violating GFDL copyrights as well as other copyrights such as those belonging to Hoodong.com and encouraging plagiarism. The project has also been criticized as heavily censoring content critical of the People's Republic of China government and the official government positions.

See also

• Chinese encyclopedias
• List of online encyclopedias

External links

• Baidu Baike (Chinese)
• Site launches 'Chinese Wikipedia' (BBC News)
• Slashdot comments on Baidu Baike

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Baidu_Baike  ^history
• Baidu  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Baidu Baike"

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