Other than highlighting Baidu Chief Scientist William Chang's statement that China doesn't need Wikipedia, here is a selection from the Twitterati (including me) on his presentation, and a concurrent one on the semantic web.
- web2asia: Robin Li of Baidu could not make it to his key note, Chief Scientist Dr. William Chang is taking over
- web2asia: facts on chinese internet: only 1/8 internet users earn usd 5000/year
- me: Baidu's William Chang: Only 1/8 of Chinese internet users earn $5,000/year.
- me: Chang: Half of Chinese users over 25, half under 25, according to CNNIC
- me: Chang: Wahaha drinks tie-in with Tencent's QQ and engage virtual currency.
- me: 很黄很暴力。(adult and violent content.) This will be solved along with copyright infringement, eventually -Chang at
- me: Baidu rep: China doesn't need Wikipedia
- me: Chang: "One could say Taobao defeated eBay in China by not charging a fee."
- web2asia: @gwbstr taobao promised not to charge for 3 years - this is the 3rd year. so the same thing will happen to them once baidu c2c gets big
- web2asia: chang now listing reasons for foreign companies failing in china, winners will b the ones that r willing to try new business models
- ullrich: W3C track, Open Your Data!: China Southeast university is strong in Semantic Web:SW search engine Falcons http://snurl.com/25ef3
- ullrich: APEX group from Shanghai Jiao Tong University also strong.
- web2asia: according to chang baidu will have significantly more than > 1000 engineers by end of 2008
- ullrich: Also strong in Semantic Web in China: KEG from Tsinghua University 2:44 PMullrich: Another strong Chinese Semantic Web research group: Dartgrid from Zhejiang University
William Chang, chief scientist leading Chinese search engine Baidu, said it's natural for Chinese to use Baidupedia (Baidu Baike) rather than the foreign Wikipedia.
"There's, in fact, no reason for China to use Wikipedia, a service based 'out there,'" Chang said at the WWW2008 conference in Beijing on Tuesday. "It's very natural for China to make its own products."
I agree that there's not always a reason for people to use global services, especially when what they deal with is primarily domestic. But with the wiki world, I think the value of cross-border, multilingual conversation is astonishingly high.
Especially as autotranslation gets better, the benefit of not having populations nationally siloed comes into focus. If we can both read and contribute knowledge to something that primarily exists in a language I don't know, then we really can share knowledge.
Until that utopian vision comes true, though, it very well may be that Wikipedia isn't yet built ideally for Chinese users. Perhaps Baidu is doing a better job for people in this country. But I hope we can all get to conversing across this divide.
For now, it's more or less moot. As I reported before, despite the fact that Wikipedia in English is now available from China, the Chinese-language version is still blocked.
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