Qiuwen Baike


Qiuwen Baike is a Chinese online encyclopedia. It was launched in June 2023 by former members of Wikimedians of Mainland China as a fork of the Chinese Wikipedia, and has been described as a "Beijing-friendly" version of Wikipedia.
The name "Qiuwen", meaning "seeking news" or "seeking knowledge", was once a name for the Chinese edition of Wikipedia Signpost.
WWW qiuwenbaike.cn

History

In an interview with the BBC in late October 2021, one of the 6 globally-banned members of the Wikimedians of Mainland China group, Techyan, said that the user group was attempting to create a "Chinese version of Wikipedia", a platform that would represent Beijing's views on some political issues for people in mainland China to access without a VPN with oversight from the Chinese government and would use some of Wikipedia's content.
In December 2021, Techyan told Fast Company that "a tech giant" was negotiating a partnership with them, and that more than 40 Chinese Wikipedia editors had joined Qiuwen, with a total of 200 active editors, and that people would be involved in both Wikipedia and Qiuwen.
In February 2022, ByteDance's subsidiary Baike.com denied the existence of a partnership between ByteDance and WMC to provide technical and financial support for Qiuwen Baike.
In April 2022, the encyclopedia "Qiuwen Baike" created by WMC became open to access, and editors from Taiwan carried out cyber attacks on the site. As of June 2023, Qiuwen Baike was open for editing.
As of December 2025, there are 5 stewards, 10 suppressors, 32 sysops, 27 patrollers, 38 senior editors, 36 autoreviewers, 0 checkusers, 16 interface admins, 1 mass message sender, 1 event sponsor, 19 importers, and 7 template editors.

Content and editorial policy

Qiuwen Baike was created by copying three-fourths of all articles from the Chinese Wikipedia. It claims that it "adopts an objective point of view based on Chinese values". However, articles containing content contrary to the Chinese government's official line have been removed. Removals of content considered contrary to official Chinese line include the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, the Xinjiang internment camps, and Falun Gong.
Qiuwen Baike's text is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Technical differences compared to Wikipedia

  • Special pages access restrictions
  • * Access of some pages in Qiuwen Baike like Recent Changes and some Draft pages "containing errors" are restricted to autoconfirmed users, users that have verified their China mainland phone numbers, and bureaucrats.
  • * Access of the Active users list is restricted to only the stewards and the owner of the website.
  • * Access of all category pages are restricted to patrollers and above.
  • * Access of the usergroup enumerating special pages are restricted to admins and above.
  • * All userpages along with the Teahouse require a logged in status to view.
  • Others
  • * The Random Article page is not a true random selection of all articles, but a random page in a category containing a selection of "good articles". The true Special:RandomPage is restricted to users that have verified their China mainland phone numbers and above.
  • * All HTTP requests to the website are required to have a UserAgent header, and must not be "default" and "non-descriptive" headers like curl, Python-urllib, HeadlessChrome, or the website will not return the requested resource and will instead return a page saying that "logging in is required". The technical team of Qiuwen Baike claims that this is to keep "malicious" clients from accessing the site. They also suggest that automated tools should have strings like bot in their UserAgent.