From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Baidu Baike

Baidu Baike's website on 29 July 2008
URL	http://baike.baidu.com/
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Registration	Compulsory
Available language(s)	Chinese
Owner	Baidu
Created by	Robin Li

Baidu Baike (Chinese: 百度百科; pinyin: Bǎidù Bǎikē; translation: Baidu Encyclopedia) is a Chinese language collaborative Web-based encyclopedia provided by the Chinese search engine Baidu.

The test version was released on April 20, 2006, and within three weeks, the encyclopedia had grown to more than 90,000 articles, surpassing that of Chinese Wikipedia. By 2008, Hudong.com had surpassed both in article count.

As of February 2010, Baidu Baike has more than 2 million articles.

Conception

Baidu's William Chang said at WWW2008, the conference of the World Wide Web Consortium, "There is, in fact, no reason for China to use Wikipedia ... It's very natural for China to make its own products."^[1]

Functions

The site is an open Internet encyclopedia espousing equality, collaboration, and sharing.^[2] The encyclopedia, with two other services provided by Baidu ("zhidao" and "post") would form a trinity to complement the search engine.

The articles are written and edited by registered users and reviewed by behind-the-scenes administrators before release. There is no formal way to contact the administrators. Registered users' contributions are rewarded in a credit point system. Although the earlier test version was named "Baidu WIKI", official media releases and pages on the encyclopedia itself state that the system is not a wiki. However, its operation is akin to a wiki and they occasionally use the word "wiki" internally.^[3]

Style and interface

The visual style of the encyclopedia is simple. In articles, only boldface and hyperlinks are supported. Comments are listed at the bottom of each page. Amongst its wiki-like functions, the site supports editing, commenting, and printing of articles, as well as an article history function.

Editing

Users can access multiple extended editing functions, including:

• An image uploading system where files less than 2 MB can be added to articles in the Encyclopedia.
• A keyword tagging system called "open category" (similar to folksonomy). One article can be tagged with at most 5 categories.
• A separate edit box for references and external links.

Copyright

Baidu Baike's copyright policy is outlined in the 'terms of use' section of its help page. In it, Baidu Baike states that by adding content to the site, users agree to assign Baidu rights to their original contributions. It also states that users cannot violate intellectual property law, and that contributions which quote works held under the Creative Commons and/or GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) must follow the restrictions of those licenses.^[4] However, on the bottom of each page, the copyright "©2009 Baidu" is displayed, contradicting to its own terms of use.

Growth

The number of articles exceeded 10,000 in two days of its launch, and reached 40,000 in six.

See also

• Chinese encyclopedias
• List of online encyclopedias

References