My view on Chinese Wikipedia
编辑Hi Maggie,
First of all, I have known both Whhalbert and Tomchiukc as great contributors and I think Tomchiukc is actually one of the earliest wikipedian around here. I am sure they have their reasons not to respond, maybe they are just too busy working on their articles. There is no protocol or rule preventing the use of English or asking for help for other Wikimedia project and you certainly didn't offend anyone or do anything wrong!
As for the word 開發人員, it is indeed translated into "developer". However, the actual use and meaning of that word might differ depends on context. If you can give me a link or a copy of the text I will translate them and make it easier for you to understand.
Like other Wikipedias, Chinese Wikipedians hold regular meetups to discuss their works or just getting to know each other. Last year alone there were almost a hundred meetups across Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China! Outside of Hong Kong and Macau it would appear that people don't travel too far just to attend a larger meeting, so most regular meetings are organized to be small-scale and informal in nature for people from the same city like Shanghai, Taipei, and Taichung.
Many of us would agree the most serious and long-lasting problem facing Chinese Wikipedia is the censorship of Wikipedia by the Chinese government. For many years Wikipedia was completely blocked in mainland China and Chinese wikipedians have to use proxies or other circumvention software in order to access and edit Wikipedia. Although the block was lifted in 2008, politically sensitive topics and articles that contain "keywords" are still being blocked by the Great firewall and Chinese government still practices sporadic blocking of Wikipedia. A long-term effect often attributed to such censorship is the Brain drain among Chinese readers as they are less likely to become productive contributors due to the inconveniences (and the risk of prosecution) in editing Wikipedia. On the other hand, Taiwanese and Hong Kongese editors contributed a disproportionate large amount of edits as compare to their readership.
Generally speaking, the influences and readership of Chinese Wikipedia across Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China are nowhere near as powerful and extensive as English Wikipedia to the West. As such conflict-of-interest edits by corporations are quite rare as average Taiwanese or Hong Kongese don't even rely on Chinese Wikipedia as a source of consumer information, although I have seen a few controversies surrounding public figures editing Chinese Wikipedia. The way I understand it, Chinese Wikipedia is still written and read predominantly by the younger, highly educated generation Y, unlike English Wikipedia where the readership extended well into the older middle-class professionals and even people with only high school diploma.
Mass media of Taiwan and Hong Kong would mention Wikipedia in the news from time to time, but the number of active contributors has reached a plateau since few years ago and we even seen declining trends sometimes. From what I read English Wikipedia also has a saturated population of active editors, but the difference is that Chinese Wikipedia is really "incomplete" in many aspects (coverage over essential topics, quality of articles, non-biased coverage of foreign topics and issues). My analysis is that English Wikipedia has an overabundance of brain power where wikipedians really focuse on "what" ideas to be written, while Chinese Wikipedia has a shortage of brain power and therefore capable editors usually put focus on reproducing the content of larger wikipedias like English and Japanese Wikipedia via translation - which is what I have focused on doing for the most part.
Most edit warrings and POV pushings are centered around articles like political status of Taiwan, China's human rights, ownership of Senkaku Islands, and the legacy of Mao Zedong, to name a few. I rarely involve in these disputes even during the early years when I was very active, as I found such disputes to be quite boring and pointless. Civility is an official policy and is enforced by administrators, although I haven't seen many users getting blocked due solely to incivility or making personal attack. Blocking and banning due to article-related edit are much more common. My hypothesis is that wikipedians here are less likely to resolve their differences through talk page discussion, and therefore the incivility that often resulted from prolonged debate on the talk page is reduced to certain extent.
On a last note, Chinese government's hostility to the free and non-censored Wikipedia also produced its own byproduct called Baidu encyclopedia. Baidu operates in a similar manner to all other Chinese rip-offs of American products and websites, it conforms to Chinese government's demand for censorship while blatantly copying contents and ideas from all over the internet including Chinese Wikipedia - often without acknowledging the original source (which violates the requirements specified in our Creative Commons license). By repeating this simple copy-and-paste baidu now has 10 times more articles than Chinese Wikipedia, leading some wikipedians to worry we might be rendered irrelevant by the rise of baidu. I think baidu is of no real threat to us though, because I personally believe the most valuable part of our encyclopedia (and the whole wikimedia project at large) is not the contents we already have but the large number of contributors who are intelligent, creative and with great ideas about how to write an encyclopedia. You can copy content all day, but you cannot persuade smart people to join a project that is intellectually inferior in nature.
Let me know if I have answered all your questions. Cheers! Lecter 咖啡館♨ 2013年4月12日 (五) 22:55 (UTC)