Wiki reboot: Chinese Wikipedia makes comeback after early censorship
A censorship blackout lost Chinese Wikipedia many of its users. Now a new generation of mainland volunteers is resuscitating the site
When Yuan Mingli posted the first Chinese-language entry on Wikipedia in November 2002, he had no idea that the website was on the verge of becoming a globally influential movement. Yuan, then a 26-year-old postgraduate student at Peking University, only intended to create an online "notebook".
Wikipedia, the biggest online encyclopedia, run by the US-based non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, had only been launched the previous year and Yuan learned of it a few weeks before he made his first entry, when there was no Chinese version.
If administrators do not control sensitive content Chinese censors will block the site
The site impressed Yuan, who majored in mathematics, and so he spent about a month studying the English version and then two weeks building the Chinese homepage and some basic web pages.
"It was in our department's lab, but I don't remember whether it was day or night," Yuan says. "I do remember though that the first entry I posted, in both simplified and traditional Chinese, was 'computer science'."
After more than a decade, and with about 715,000 entries, Chinese is the 12th most popular language for posts on Wikipedia, after Japanese, Polish and Portuguese, but slightly ahead of Vietnamese.
The mainland had nearly 600 million internet users as of the middle of last month. Yet there are only 1.4 million registered Chinese users on the site, and only 7,500 were active on Wikipedia as of last month - most of them from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
