135 Country Report: Wikipedia
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Wikipedia’s presence is very limited in China; since Wikipedia’s launch in 2001, it has been blocked and unblocked periodically by the Chinese government. In 2019, Wikipedia has been officially taken down by the Chinese government and is not accessible in mainland China(could still be accessed in Hong Kong and Macau). Although Chinese citizens could use a virtual private network(VPN) to access Wikipedia, there are cases where users were penalized by the local police for using VPNs. Since Wikipedia’s access is mostly restricted, it is not considered a well-regarded information source in China. Baidu Baike, which is often considered as a Chinese Wikipedia alternative, is much more prevalent as an information source.
According to Wikimedia, a nonprofit organization, there are over 800,000,000 page views of Simplified Chinese Wikipedia in January of 2022 alone; these page views are made up of 3,185,490 users and 8,428 active users. When compared with Wikipedia pages of other languages, Simplified Chinese Wikipedia has the 5th most users and 9th most active users. I find the user base for Simplified Chinese Wikipedia surprisingly large considering the website is restricted in mainland China.
The Wikipedia page for the People’s Republic of China contains a wide range of information; it includes history, geography, politics, military, science and technology, Demographics, Culture, and many more. The context between the English and Simplified Chinese Wikipedia page for the People’s Republic of China is almost identical; I did not notice any obvious censorship when I juxtaposed the two pages.
Simplified Chinese Wikipedia has a total of over 1,200,000 articles and almost 70,000,000 edits. There are 65 administrators for Simplified Chinese Wikipedia. Based on the few administrators’ profiles that I checked, they all seem to have distinct focus, backgrounds and are living in different countries around the world.
Sources:
History of Wikipedia censorship in China:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia
Chinese citizens penalized for using Wikipedia: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-china-cracks-down-on-illegal-web-use/
Baidu Baiku as Wikipedia alternative in China: https://sampi.co/guide-baidu-baike/#:~:text=Baidu%20Baike%20is%20the%20Chinese,most%20visited%20websites%20in%20China.
Number of Simplified Chinese Wikipedia page views in January 2022: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/zh.wikipedia.org/reading/total-page-views/normal|bar|all|~total|monthly
Number of Simplified Chinese Wikipedia users: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias/Table
Simplified Chinese Wikipedia page of People’s Republic of China : https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E4%B8%AD%E5%8D%8E%E4%BA%BA%E6%B0%91%E5%85%B1%E5%92%8C%E5%9B%BD#%E6%94%BF%E6%B2%BB
English Wikipedia page of People’s Republic of China :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China