Baidu Baike


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Baidu Baike

Baidu Baike's website on 28 April, 2008
URL http://baike.baidu.com/
Commercial? No
Type of site Internet encyclopedia project
Registration Compulsory
Available language(s) Chinese
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.

Contents

Conception

Baidu's William Chang said at WWW2008, "There is, in fact, no reason for China to use Wikipedia ... It's very natural for China to make its own products." [1]

Functions of the website

The site is an open Internet encyclopedia espousing equality, collaboration, and sharing.[2] 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[3].

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[4]:

  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.[5]

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.[6][7] The project has also been criticized as heavily censoring content critical of the People's Republic of China government and the official government positions.[7]

See also

References

  1. ^ Graham Webster (2008-04-22). "Baidu's William Chang: 'No reason for China to use Wikipedia'". CNET News. Retrieved on 2008-06-22.
  2. ^ "百度百科". Baidu Baike. Retrieved on 2006-05-11.
  3. ^ For example, when a keyword is entered and the button "search" is clicked then, it would give a page of a url like this 
    http://baike.baidu.com/w?ct=17&lm=0&tn=baiduWikiSearch&pn=0&rn=10&word=%B0%D9%B6%C8%D5%E6%C0%C3&submit=search
    , which has the concert "wiki" included. Re-valid at June 22nd, 2008.
  4. ^ "百科原则". Baike Baidu. Retrieved on 2006-12-24.
  5. ^ "百度搜索帮助中心-百度百科帮助". Baike Baidu. Retrieved on 2006-05-11.
  6. ^ Dan Nystedt (2008-08-26). "Baidu May Be Worst Wikipedia Copyright Violator". PC World. Retrieved on 2008-03-29.
  7. ^ a b Eva Woo (2007-11-13). "Baidu's Censored Answer to Wikipedia". Business Week. Retrieved on 2008-03-29.

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