Chinese Wikipedia
The Chinese Wikipedia is the written vernacular Chinese edition of Wikipedia. It was created on 11 May 2001. It is one of multiple projects supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Chinese Wikipedia currently has articles, registered users, and active editors, of whom have administrative privileges.
The Chinese Wikipedia has been blocked in mainland China since May 2015. Nonetheless, the Chinese Wikipedia is still one of the top ten most active versions of Wikipedia by number of edits and number of editors, due to contributions from users from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Chinese diaspora. Readers from Taiwan and Hong Kong contribute most of the page views of the Chinese Wikipedia.
Despite being censored in mainland China, and as VPNs are normally not allowed to edit Wikipedia, Wikipedia administrators from China have permitted IP block exemption for a select number of mainland users. Such users are recruited to change the editorial content on Wikipedia in support of China's viewpoint and/or to support the election of pro-Chinese government administrators on Wikipedia, with the aim of gaining control of Wikipedia as part of the Chinese Communist Party's coordinated efforts to push their preferred narrative on platforms that have respected worldwide credibility. There has also been an exodus of volunteer editors leaving Baidu Baike, a domestic competitor beset by problems of self-censorship and commercialization, to join Chinese Wikipedia because the "contributors wanted the privilege of working on a higher-quality internet encyclopedia" that also "carries a great deal of international power". Observers have suggested that such moves are not just due to patriotic mainlanders but a "larger structural coordinated strategy the government has to manipulate these platforms" beside Wikipedia, such as Twitter and Facebook.
The resulting pro-Beijing Wikipedia community, the Wikimedians of Mainland China, has clashed with Wikipedia editors from Taiwan and Hong Kong, not only over content disputes on Wikipedia articles, but also made death threats against their Wikimedian communities. In particular, the WMC has threatened to report Wikipedia editors to Hong Kong's national security police hotline over the disputed article "2019–2020 Hong Kong protests" characterized by edit warring. The Foundation's investigation also found that "infiltrators had tried to promote "the aims of China, as interpreted through whatever filters they may bring to bear" and that the WMC had been involved in vote-stacking and manipulation of administrative elections.
Due to such threats to volunteer safety, as well as the manipulation of administrative elections by Mainland editors, Wikimedia revoked access of seven editors and downgraded the privileges of 12 Mainland-based administrators on 16 September 2021 over "infiltration concerns." The affair caused significant controversy on Chinese Wikipedia, and also drew critical commentary from Chinese media, where Wikipedia is rarely discussed.
History
The Chinese Wikipedia was established along with twelve other Wikipedias in May 2001. At the beginning, however, the Chinese Wikipedia did not support Chinese characters and had no encyclopedic content.In October 2002, the first Chinese-language page was written, the Main Page. A software update on 27 October 2002 allowed Chinese language input. The domain was set to be zh.wikipedia.org, with zh based on the ISO code for the Chinese language. On 17 November 2002, the user Mountain translated the computer science article into :zh:计算机科学, thus creating its first real encyclopedic article.
In order to accommodate the orthographic differences between simplified Chinese characters and traditional Chinese characters, from 2002 to 2003, the Chinese Wikipedia community gradually decided to combine the two originally separate versions of the Chinese Wikipedia. The first running automatic conversion between the two orthographic representations started on 23 December 2004, with the MediaWiki 1.4 release. The needs from Hong Kong and Singapore were taken into account in the MediaWiki 1.4.2 release, which made the conversion table for zh-sg default to zh-cn, and zh-hk default to zh-tw.
In its early days, most articles on the Chinese Wikipedia were translated from the English version. The first five sysops, or administrators, were promoted on 14 June 2003.
Wikipedia was first introduced by the mainland Chinese media in the newspaper China Computer Education on 20 October 2003, in the article, "I join to write an encyclopedia". On 16 May 2004, Wikipedia was first reported by Taiwanese media in the newspaper China Times. Since then, many newspapers have published articles about the Chinese Wikipedia, and several sysops have been interviewed by journalists.
Ivan Zhai of the South China Morning Post wrote that the blocks from the mainland authorities in the 2000s stifled the growth of the Chinese Wikipedia, and that by 2013 there was a new generation of users originating from the Mainland who were taking efforts to make the Chinese Wikipedia grow. In 2024, there were 3.6 million registered users on the Chinese Wikipedia, and in July 2013 7,500 of these users were active, with most of them originating from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Naming
The Chinese name of Wikipedia was decided on 21 October 2003, following a vote. The name means "Wiki Encyclopedia". The Chinese transcription of "Wiki" is composed of two characters: 維, whose ancient sense refers to 'ropes or webs connecting objects', and alludes to the 'Internet'; and 基, meaning the 'foundations of a building', or 'fundamental aspects of things in general'. The name can be interpreted as 'the encyclopedia that connects the fundamental knowledge of humanity'.The most common Chinese translation for wiki technology is 維基; however, it can be 維客 or 圍紀, which are also transcriptions of the word "wiki". As a result, the term 維基 has become associated exclusively with Wikimedia projects.
The Chinese Wikipedia also has a sub header: 海納百川，有容乃大, which means, "The sea encompasses hundreds of rivers/all rivers will eventually flow into the sea; it has capacity i.e. is willing to accept all and is thus great." The sub header originated from the first half of a couplet composed by the Qing Dynasty official Lin Zexu.
Community
According to Wikimedia Statistics, in January 2021, the majority of viewers and editors on the Chinese Wikipedia were from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Numerous viewers and users are from Macau, Singapore, Malaysia, United States and other countries with a high Chinese diaspora; but there are some viewers from China as well.In April 2016, the project had 2,127 active editors who made at least five edits in that month.
The most discussed and debated topics on the Chinese Wikipedia are political issues in Chinese modern history. For example, the six most edited articles as of August 2007 were Taiwan, Chinese culture, China, Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek, and Hong Kong, in that order. In contrast, issues such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are much less contentious.
Wikipedians from China, Taiwan, and other regions have engaged in editing conflicts over political topics related to Cross-Straits relations. Due to the censorship in mainland China, Chinese Wikipedia's audience comes primarily from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and the diasporas in Malaysia, the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Korea, totaling approximately 60 million people. Chinese Wikipedia has more than 9,100 active editors as of July 2021, and this number is increasing.
Approximately half of Chinese Wikipedia's 610 million pageviews monthly come from Taiwan, with approximately 20% coming from Hong Kong, 8% from United States, 4% from Malaysia and the rest from Singapore, Macau, mainland China and the Chinese diaspora. In 2021, the monthly pageviews of Chinese Wikipedia underwent a spike in growth from around 380 million to 620 million pageviews in six months.
Administrators
As of June 2019, there are 78 administrators, or sysops. They are all elected by Chinese Wikipedians. Most of them come from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. There are also a few who come from the United States, Singapore, and Japan.Meetings
The first Chinese Wikipedian meeting was held in Beijing on 25 July 2004. Since then, Chinese Wikipedians from different regions have held many gatherings in Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, Shenyang, Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Currently, a regular meetup is held once every two weeks in Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong, and once every month in Tainan City, Taiwan. In July 2006, Taiwanese Wikipedians also held a "travelling meetup", travelling by train through four Taiwanese cities over a period of two days. In August 2006, Hong Kong hosted the first annual Chinese Wikimedia Conference.Chinese Wikipedians advertise Wikipedia in different ways. Many of them use Weibo, a Chinese socializing website similar to Twitter. Several Chinese Wikipedians created the Wikipedia monthly magazine, or journal, called "The Wikipedians" in December 2012, which is currently published once a month.