Qiuwen Baike is a Chinese

online encyclopedia An online encyclopedia, also called an Internet encyclopedia, is a digital encyclopedia accessible through the Internet. Some examples include pre-World Wide Web services that offered the '' Academic American Encyclopedia'' beginning in 1980, Enc ...

. It was launched in June 2023 by former members of Wikimedians of Mainland China as a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods either to h ...

of the

Chinese Wikipedia The Chinese Wikipedia () is the written vernacular Chinese edition of Wikipedia. It was created on 11 May 2001. It is one of multiple projects supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. The Chinese Wikipedia currently has articles, registered ...

, and has been described as a "Beijing-friendly" version of

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

. The name "Qiuwen", meaning "seeking news" or "seeking knowledge", was once a name for the Chinese edition of Wikipedia Signpost.

History

In an interview with the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

in late October 2021, globally-banned WMC member Techyan () and 6 other users said the user group was attempting to create a "Chinese version of Wikipedia", a platform that would represent Beijing's views on some political issues for people in mainland China to access without a VPN with oversight from the Chinese government and would use some of Wikipedia's content. Techyan

In December 2021, Techyan told ''

Fast Company ''Fast Company'' is an American business magazine published monthly in print and online, focusing on technology, business, and design. It releases six print issues annually. History ''Fast Company'' was founded in November 1995 by Alan Webb ...

'' that "a tech giant" was negotiating a partnership with them, and that more than 40

editors had joined Qiuwen with has a total of 200 active editors. and that people would be involved in both

and Qiuwen. In February 2022,

ByteDance ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Haidian, 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 ap ...

's subsidiary Baike.com denied the existence of a partnership between ByteDance and WMC to provide technical and financial support for Qiuwen Baike. In April 2022, the encyclopedia "Qiuwen Baike" created by WMC became open to access, and editors from Taiwan carried out cyber attacks on the site. As of June 2023, Qiuwen Baike was open for editing. As of February 2025, there are 5 stewards (, highest level of usergroup except website owner), 10 suppressers (), 31 sysops, 23 patrollers, 38 senior editors, 34 autoreviewers, 0 checkusers, 15 interface admins, 1 mass message sender, 1 event sponsor, 12 importers (transwiki), and 4 template editors.

Content and editorial policy

Qiuwen Baike was created by copying three-fourths of all articles from the

. It claims that it "adopts objective point of view based on Chinese values". However, articles containing content contrary to the Chinese government's official line have been removed. Removals of content considered contrary to official Chinese line include the

1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre The Tiananmen Square protests, known within China as the June Fourth Incident, were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, lasting from 15 April to 4 June 1989. After weeks of unsuccessful attempts between t ...

, the

Xinjiang internment camps The Xinjiang internment camps, officially called vocational education and training centers by the government of the People's Republic of China, are internment camps operated by the government of Xinjiang and the Chinese Communist Party P ...

, and

Falun Gong Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, is a new religious movement founded by its leader Li Hongzhi in China in the early 1990s. Falun Gong has its global headquarters in Dragon Springs, a compound in Deerpark, New York, United States, near t ...

. Qiuwen Baike's text is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Technical differences compared to Wikipedia

* Special pages access restrictions ** Access (reading) of some pages in Qiuwen Baike like Recent Changes and some Draft pages "containing errors" are restricted to autoconfirmed users (7/50), users that have verified their China mainland phone numbers, and bureaucrats. ** Access of the Active users list (Special:ActiveUsers) is restricted to only the stewards and the owner of the website. ** Access of all category pages are restricted to patrollers and above. ** Access of the (Special:ListUsers) usergroup enumerating special pages are restricted to admins and above. ** All userpages (and their talk pages) along with the Teahouse require a logged in status to view. * Others ** The Random Article page is not a true random selection of all articles, but a random page in a category containing a selection of "good articles". The true Special:RandomPage is restricted to users that have verified their China mainland phone numbers and above (patrollers, admins, senior editors, etc.). ** All HTTP requests to the website are required to have a UserAgent header, and must not be "default" and "non-descriptive" headers like curl, Python-urllib, HeadlessChrome, or the website will not return the requested resource and will instead return a page saying that "logging in is required". The technical team of QiuWen Baike claims that this is to keep "malicious" clients from accessing the site. They also suggest that automated tools should have strings like bot in their UserAgent.

References

External links

* {{Wikis Chinese websites Internet properties established in the 2020s Wikis MediaWiki websites Free-content websites

History

Content and editorial policy

Technical differences compared to Wikipedia

See also

References

External links