Baidu Baike's website on 29 July 2008 |
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| URL | baike.baidu.com |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Internet encyclopedia project |
| Registration | Compulsory |
| Available language(s) | Chinese |
| Owner | Baidu |
| Created by | Robin Li |
Baidu Encyclopedia[1] (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. Like Baidu itself, the encyclopedia is heavily self-censored in line with government regulations.[2]
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 2008, Hudong.com had surpassed both in article count.
As of July 2011, Baidu Baike has more than 3.5 million articles, about ten times more than the Chinese Wikipedia.
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Baidu's William Chang said at WWW2008, the conference of the World Wide Web Consortium, "There is, in fact, no reason for China to use Wikipedia ... It's very natural for China to make its own products."[3]
The site is an open Internet encyclopedia espousing equality, collaboration, and sharing.[4] 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. However, its operation is akin to a wiki and they occasionally use the word "wiki" internally.[5]
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.
Users can access multiple extended editing functions, including:
Articles or comments containing the following types of content are removed:[6]
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.[7] However, on the bottom of each page, the copyright "©2009 Baidu" is displayed, contradicting its own terms of use.
Baidu Baike has been criticized for violating the GFDL when using Wikipedia content as well as other copyrights such as those belonging to Hudong.com and encouraging plagiarism generally.[8][2]
The number of articles exceeded 10,000 in two days of its launch, and reached 40,000 in six.
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(The numbers are from the article count on the main page.)
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