Baike.com (), formerly Hudong and Hoodong (), is a for-profit

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods fo ...

in Chinese, including the world's largest Chinese encyclopedia. It is one of the two largest

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

s in China, along with

Baidu Baike Baidu Baike (; , also known as Baidu Wiki) is a semi-regulated Chinese-language collaborative online encyclopedia owned by the Chinese technology company Baidu. The beta version was launched on April 20, 2006, and the official version was lau ...

, claiming to have more than 18 million articles as of 2020 and more than 5.77 million volunteers, as of April 2013.

History

Baike.com was founded in 2005 by CEO Pan Haidong, who had moved back to China after earning a PhD in systems engineering from

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original cam ...

in 2002. Baike.com, a 2007 RedHerring 100 Asia company, developed its own wiki software platform, called HDWiki, as a rival to

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for Media ...

. The system has some

social networking A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...

-like interactive features, such as user profile, friends and groups. The first version was released in November 2006 and by November 2007 version 3 with added functions, features, and more stability was released. The HDWiki software is free for non-commercial use, has been downloaded 200,000 times and currently supports over 1,000 other web sites in China (as of December 2007), consisting mostly of tech researchers,

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

groups, government, universities, and high school students. In 2011, it was announced that

Draper Fisher Jurvetson Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth ...

had invested $15 million in Baike.com. On 22 February 2011, Baike.com submitted a complaint to the

State Administration for Industry and Commerce Prior to March 2018, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC; ) was the authority in the People's Republic of China responsible for advancing legislation concerning the administration of industry and commerce in the People's Repub ...

asking for a review of the behavior of

Baidu Baidu, Inc. ( ; , meaning "hundred times") is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence (AI), headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District. It is one of the l ...

, accusing it of being monopolistic. In December 2012, the company changed its English name from Hudong to Baike.com. In 2019, the company was acquired by

ByteDance ByteDance Ltd. () is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Founded by Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo and a team of others in 2012, ByteDance developed the video-sharing social networkin ...

Features

Baike.com is a

and lets its users edit and contribute material. Frequent users may accumulate credits redeemable for gifts. It has also included features of social networking sites, including chat forums and fan groups. Baike.com is a for-

profit Profit may refer to: Business and law * Profit (accounting), the difference between the purchase price and the costs of bringing to market * Profit (economics), normal profit and economic profit * Profit (real property), a nonpossessory inter ...

business partially supported by advertising and paid support services.

References

External links

*{{Official website, http://www.baike.com 2005 establishments in China Chinese online encyclopedias Internet properties established in 2005 Wiki communities 21st-century encyclopedias ByteDance

History

Features

See also

References

Further reading

External links