Baidu Baike

Encyclopedia : B : BA : BAI : Baidu Baike

Baidu Baike (}; }) is a Chinese collaborative online encyclopedia hosted by the major Chinese search engine Baidu. The test version was released on April 20, 2006 and three weeks later the encyclopedia already had more than 90,000 articles.

The Baidu encyclopedia is a wiki-like project that is modeled after the Chinese Wikipedia, and is currently prospering as an information source in the wake of China's blockage of Wikipedia. Part of its campaign of Internet censorship, humorously dubbed the "Great Firewall of China," both the blockage of Wikipedia as well as its apparent copying are controversial among free speech and democracy advocates worldwide.

Contents

1 Description

1.1 Style and interface
1.2 Fast growing
1.3 Principle of the encyclopedia

2 Copyright

2.1 On the source materials
2.2 On Baidu Baike itself

3 The name
4 See also
5 Sources and notes
6 Further reading

Description

According to the first article, which is about the encyclopedia itself, the encyclopedia is an open net encyclopedia holding equality, collaboration, and sharing as principles. The article also states that the encyclopedia, with two other services provided by Baidu ("zhidao" and "post") would form a trinity system and complement the search engine.

The articles are written and edited by registered users and reviewed by backstage administrators before release. There is no formal way to contact the administrators.

Registered users' contributions are rewarded in a credit point system.

Although the earlier test version was named "Baidu WIKI", the current version and official media releases say the system is not a wiki system.

Style and interface

The system supports "edit", "comment", "historical version", and "print".

The system supports these edit functions:

The system allows users to upload a picture file (less than 2 MB) for the articles.
The system supports a category system called "open category" (similar to folksonomy). One article can be tagged with at most 5 categories.
The system provides an independent edit box for references and external links.

The style of the encyclopedia is simple. Only boldface and hyperlinks are supported.

Comments are listed at the bottom of the page.

Fast growing

The number of articles exceeded 10,000 in two days, and reached 40,000 in six days.

Date	Number of articles
May 5	82,788
May 14	118,119
May 21	142,283
July 7	271,118
July 10	276,026
July 15	283,417

Principle of the encyclopedia

According to Baidu Baike's policies^[link], these kinds of articles or comments would be deleted:

pornographic or violent articles
advertising
politically reactionary content
personal attacks
unethical content
malicious, meaningless content

The third point is particularly notable, as the content of the encyclopedia will have to satisfy the Chinese government. There are no articles about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, "六四" (literally "six four", a common acronym for the protest), or Falungong ("法轮功"). In fact, due to the effects of Great Firewall of China, attempts to search for these terms from some domains lead to denial of access to the Baidu search engine for several minutes if the user is outside mainland China (but not for users inside).

Copyright

On the source materials

On the help page the encyclopedia states "users shall not violate [. . . .] intellectual property" ("百度百科的用戶不得侵犯…知識產權"), and declares:

3. 百度百科的用户在百度百科上发布的内容引用自适用CC协议（“创作共用”协议，保证作者署名权。不得用于商业目的。保证作品完整性。参见http://creativecommons.cn/，http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/cn/ 中文版）和/或GFDL协议（GNU自由文档协议，必须注明该文章是在GNU自由文档协议证书下发布的，也不得阻止别人自由取得该文章或其他GNU FDL所赋予的权利。参见http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html）保护的作品的，应按照上述协议的规定，合理使用他人作品。

[rough translationΥ. The Baidubaike's users' contributions that quote from works under the Creative Commons (Attribution, Noncommercial and No Derivative Works. See http://creativecommons.cn/, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/cn/ the Chinese version) and/or GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License), shall follow the restrictions of the licenses mentioned above. [emphasis added]

[rough translationΩ. Copyright of Baidubaike's users' contributions belongs to the original authors, unless otherwise noted.

The help page also provides a postal address for notification of rights violation.

On Baidu Baike itself

The help page declared that Baidu has the rights to re-license the original contents on the encyclopedia:

8. 对于用户发表到百度百科上可公开获取区域的任何原创内容，用户同意百度在全世界范围内具有免费的、永久性的、不可撤销的、非独家的和完全再许可的权利

The name

Look up in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

The name Baike is composed of the characters bǎi (百) meaning "hundred" (also the first character of Baidu), and kē (科) meaning "branch of knowledge".

The word "百科" is used in combination to form other words to express "encyclopedia", such as "百科全书/百科全書" (bǎikē quánshū, literally "encyclopedia book") in Chinese, or "百科事典" in Korean and Japanese. The word "bách khoa toàn thư" in Vietnamese is a cognate of the Chinese term.

Sources and notes

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