Re: [Wikizh-l] Who Did What in China’s Past? Look It Up, or Maybe Not - NYT

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By December 1, 2006 Who Did What in China's Past? Look It Up, or Maybe Not By HOWARD W. FRENCH SHANGHAI, Nov. 30 — Just who was Mao Zedong? In the English-language version of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, he was a victorious military and political leader who founded China's modern Communist state. But he was also a man whom many saw as "a mass murderer, holding his leadership accountable for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent Chinese." Switch to Wikipedia in Chinese, though, and you read about a very different man. There, Mao's reputation is unsullied by mention of any death toll in the great purges of the 1950s and 1960s, like the Great Leap Forward, a mass collectivization and industrialization campaign begun in 1958 that produced what many historians call the greatest famine in human history. Wikipedia, an open encyclopedia founded in 2001 that allows ordinary users to create and edit the vast bulk of its entries, has always posed a challenge to China's hypersensitive censors. Earlier this month, the government opened access to both the English and Chinese sites, though it has since resumed its blackout on the Chinese site. But on questions of this country's modern history or on hot-button topical issues, the Chinese version diverges so significantly from its English counterpart that it sometimes reads as if it were approved by the censors themselves. This gulf comes across powerfully in the entry on Mao, one of the most frequently searched and edited topics in Chinese, and in items on historical watersheds, like the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Chinese Wikipedia users and critics say the differences highlight the resilience of a system of information control whose reach goes well beyond simple censorship. In each of its language versions, Wikipedia is collaboratively written and edited by online enthusiasts. As such, its articles reflect the constantly shifting collective effort of its contributors, who may add and delete material at will. Contributors to the Chinese-language site attribute the contrasts with the English-language version to the powerful influence of Chinese education, which often provides a neatly sanitized national perspective on turbulent events in the country's past. The parochialism is reinforced by the blocking of foreign Web sites and by the careful censorship of the news media. Alternative viewpoints are sometimes available, but usually only to a restricted circle of people who have the means and determination to seek them out. For some, the Chinese version of Wikipedia was intended as just such a resource, but its tame approach has set off a fierce debate in the world of online mavens over its objectivity and thoroughness. In a recent discussion on the encyclopedia's Web site about Mao's legacy, a user with the online name Manchurian Tiger wrote, "If anyone can prove that Mao's political movements didn't kill so many people, I'm willing to delete the wording that 'millions of people were killed.' " Rather than contribute to encyclopedias, those who wish to pay tribute to Mao, he added, should "go to his mausoleum." Another user replied angrily: "If you want to release your emotions, use a bulletin board. Wikipedia is not your toilet." In the end, caution prevailed, and the entry on Mao included no death toll from either famine or purges. In most instances, it seems, the fight over editorial direction of Wikipedia is won by enthusiasts who practice self-censorship. "Most of the people who contribute to Wikipedia rarely touch upon political topics," said Yuan Mingli, a frequent contributor from Shanghai. "They prefer to write about things like technology. There are other things in life." Others say the object should be to spread reliable information as widely as possible, and that, in any case, self-censorship is pointless because the government still frequently blocks access to Wikipedia for most Chinese Internet users. "There is a lot of confusion about whether they should obey the neutral point of view or offer some compromises to the government," said Isaac Mao, a well-known Chinese blogger and user of the encyclopedia. "To the local Wikipedians, the first objective is to make it well known among Chinese, to get people to understand the principles of Wikipedia step by step, and not to get the thing blocked by the government." After Mao, few questions are treated as more sacrosanct in China than the status of Taiwan, which every pupil is taught is irrevocably part of China. To publicly suggest that Taiwanese have any historical basis for asserting their independence from China would be a career-ending offense for anyone in academia or in the news media. The English-language version of the encyclopedia speaks of a Japanese shipwreck incident off Taiwan in 1871, in which 54 crew members were beheaded by Taiwanese aborigines. Japan demanded compensation from China, only to be told that Taiwan was not in China's jurisdiction. The Chinese-language entry on Taiwan, meanwhile, is silent on the jurisdiction question. Similarly, the English-language Wikipedia mentions the settlement of Taiwan about 4,000 years ago by aborigines who are genetically related to Malaysians. It also places the first meaningful settlement of the island by Chinese in the 16th century. The Chinese version merely speaks of cultural affinities with Malaysians and speculates about the possible exploration of the island by Chinese as far back as the third century. A parallel, and purely homegrown effort at creating an online encyclopedia in China, Baidu Baike, skirts controversies like these altogether. The site, owned by China's biggest Internet search engine, asserts that Taiwan's original inhabitants "came from mainland China directly or indirectly," and not from Malaysia. Similarly, a user who searches for the Tiananmen Square massacre will find no entry. As online reference sites grow in popularity here, Baidu Baike benefits from the government's efforts to block Wikipedia, just as its parent company once benefited from the government's blockage of Google. Baidu Baike, much of whose uncontroversial content appears to be copied directly from Wikipedia, would not release detailed user statistics, saying only that it had "several million" users every day. A spokeswoman for the company, Zhang Yan, said it was guided by the editorial policy of not "judging the existing national system with malice." Asked to explain what this meant, Ms. Zhang said, "Anyone who is Chinese knows." 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