This page is part of the Proceedings of Wikimania 2005, Frankfurt, Germany.

"We-create-pedia" in China

Author(s): Isaac Mao
License: TBD
Language: English
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About the author(s): Isaac Mao is one of the first active Chinese bloggers, and a co-founder of CNBlog.org. He organized the first Social Software Forum in China. Isaac is a principal researcher at CES Labs on e-Learning and co-founder of oedu.org; he has also helped found several for-profit businesses in China. Prior to his current research/social work, he was the CEO at Tangram Software and Chief Software Architect of Intel Shanghai Architecture Lab.

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Heart of the beats what i see

The Chinese Wikipedian community is becoming a major force in global Wikipedia space. Wikipedia's Chinese edition has developed fast in a short period of time, and brings a new atmosphere to the Chinese community in cyberspace. E.g., online collaboration, doing-democracy and constructive confrontation, etc. However, the Chinese Wikipedia has enjoyed no exception to the tight voice control over media and internet by China's government. The NPOV idea is becoming a challenge to China's censorship system, the Great Firewall, because even mentioning some terms and words in articles could lead to being filtered by the system.

As more and more wiki-based ideas like Wikinews emerge, hopefully, the problem can be noticed and resolved by global collaboration, with new technologies and social efforts. Wikipedia will change Chinese society by providing a new social norm to help more and more Chinese to learn how to collaborate and respect diverse viewpoints in the world. It may become one of the driving forces of China's upgrading to a more democratic country.