20 Facts About Chinese Wikipedia

Chinese Wikipedia is the written vernacular Chinese edition of Wikipedia.

Chinese Wikipedia was established along with 12 other Wikipedias in May 2001.

At the beginning the Chinese Wikipedia did not support Chinese characters, and had no encyclopedic content.

On 16 May 2004, Chinese Wikipedia was first reported by Taiwanese media in the newspaper China Times.

Ivan Zhai of the South China Morning Post wrote that the blocks from the mainland authorities in the 2000s stifled the growth of the Chinese Wikipedia, and that by 2013 there was a new generation of users originating from the Mainland who were taking efforts to make the Chinese Wikipedia grow.

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In 2021, the monthly pageviews of Chinese Wikipedia underwent a spike in growth from around 380 million to 620 million pageviews in six months.

Many editing controversies arise from current and historical political events in Chinese Wikipedia-speaking regions, such as the political status of Taiwan, independent movement and autonomy movement of Hong Kong, Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement, 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, issues of the Chinese Wikipedia Communist Party and Kuomintang.

Chinese Wikipedia is based on written vernacular Chinese, the official Chinese written language in all Chinese-speaking regions, including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore.

Varieties of Chinese Wikipedia are a diverse group encompassing many regional topolects, most of which are mutually unintelligible and often divided up into several larger dialect groups, such as Wu, Min Nan, and Cantonese.

However, they met with significant opposition, based on the fact that Mandarin-based Vernacular Chinese Wikipedia is the only form used in scholarly or academic contexts.

Objections notwithstanding, it was determined that these Chinese varieties were sufficiently different from Standard Chinese and had a sufficiently large number of followers to justify the creation of six Wikipedias for different varieties.

The affair caused significant controversy on Chinese Wikipedia, and drew critical commentary from Chinese media, where Wikipedia is rarely discussed.

The Chinese Wikipedia has articles related to Taiwan independence, written by contributors from Taiwan and elsewhere.

Dozens of editors from across mainland China reported that they could only access Chinese Wikipedia using proxy servers, although there were isolated reports that some users could access Chinese Wikipedia without using a proxy.

Some reports indicated a complete unblock; others suggested that some sensitive topics remained blocked, and yet others suggested that the Chinese Wikipedia was blocked whereas other-language versions were not.

Any attempt to access the Chinese Wikipedia resulted in a 60-second ban on all Wikimedia websites.

On 31 July 2008, BBC reported that the Chinese Wikipedia had been unblocked that day in China; it had still been blocked the previous day.

Chinese Wikipedia added that for controversial topics such as the 1989 protests, he should be a little more cautious.

Chinese Wikipedia urged Wikipedia to reflect the voices and views of the Chinese government in an objective way.

Whereas the Chinese Wikipedia is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, Baidu Baike and Hudong are fully copyrighted by their ownership; contributors forfeit all rights upon submission.