SAR in great meeting of minds
The Standard | A07,A09 | Metro | Jonathan Cheng | 2006-Aug-26
Mainlanders due to attend first Chinese Wikipedia conference despite blocking of top Web service
Twenty mainlanders have registered to attend the first Chinese Wikipedia conference being held in Hong Kong this weekend even though the Web encyclopedia is inaccessible across the border. Event organizer Larry Lo Wing-kei said the group is scheduled to have a closed-door meeting to discuss such issues with Wikipedia’s visionary founder, Jimmy Wales, who will attend the conference.
The presence of the 20 has special significance because in the mainland Wikipedia has been blocked several times – once on the eve of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Since then, the site has been periodically blocked, and remains inaccessible today.
For years, the amateur encyclopedists behind Chinese Wikipedia have toiled in the anonymity of bedrooms and Internet cafes, fulfilling what many of them call a grand purpose.
That is plugging the world’s billion- odd Chinese speakers into the information age’s most ambitious database of knowledge. Together, they have written tens of thousands of articles on everything from egg tarts to communism, devoting days and nights to editing articles, arguing over issues and, in the process, building a vast online community. But it will only be this weekend that they will finally be able to meet each other in person.
The long-delayed get-together can be explained easily enough by the natural isolation of online users, but Chinese Wikipedia’s members are also divided by a different barrier: politics.
The blocking of Wikipedia on the mainland has, of course, only helped make Chinese Wikipedia a cause celebre in the politically charged sphere of China-watchers.
Site blocking is also an issue that will loom large this weekend, at the first such conference for Wikipedia users in this part of the world.
Most of the users of the Chinese language are in China, but they cannot even use this information, Lo says.
He admits there is no simple solution to the problem, but argues that Wikipedia cannot change its principles because the Chinese government doesn’t like it.
The site has become one of the Web’s most powerful phenomena, premised on a central guiding principle: an online encyclopedia of knowledge that is free to use and edit may build bridges of understanding in a shrinking world.
But in China, the inherent openness of the concept has created a number of thorny issues.
Like its cousins in the English language and dozens of others, Chinese Wikipedia has exploded in what feels like the blink of an eye, growing from a mere idea five years ago to a fixture today on the Internet landscape.
But unlike other language versions of the online encyclopedia, Chinese Wikipedia has been challenged by the politics that separates its users in China, the world’s most populous country, and Chinese speakers in other geographical parts of its online community, such as Taiwan and Hong Kong.
After online users decided they would hold the event, says Jerry Chan Yu, the co-organizer of the conference, Hong Kong was found to be the only place that proved a plausible contender. The mainland was out for a variety of political reasons, while a Taiwan venue would make it virtually impossible for many mainland fans to attend.
There are relatively fewer Chinese Wikipedia users in Singapore, though three have registered to attend from Malaysia.
Chan is only 18, having sailed through his A-level exams earlier this summer.
But together with Lo, Chan is responsible for overseeing the more than 100 delegates and guests who are arriving in Hong Kong – including Wales and the 20 mainlanders.
For Chan, Wikipedia became a fascination after he stumbled across a page incorrectly listing the chronology of British prime ministers – a factual error common in the world of Wikipedia.
After fixing it up using the Web site’s simple editing function, he went on to write an article about the Hapsburg Empire.
Chan, who has a passion for European history, acknowledges the built-in controversy in Wikipedia, but insists on a simple but powerful idea: knowledge is not knowledge unless it is shared.
If you know something, you should share it, Chan says.
You can’t just hold your knowledge and not tell anybody. That’s meaningless.
Right now, Chinese Wikipedia’s 80,000 articles ranks it 12th in size among the 229 languages in which Wikipedia is available. English Wikipedia is the largest, with 1.3 million articles, tripling second-placed German.
For Lo, his initial interest in the project was more local.
After stumbling upon the English version in a Google search, he wrote his first Wikipedia article in 2002, on the Tsing Ma Bridge.
The article was short – just a few sentences, he recalls – but it immediately spawned a number of thankful replies from users.
That got me hooked, he says. It’s not just a Web site or source of information, it’s a community where everyone works towards the same goal.
That initial post was the spark that Lo needed, and he went on to write dozens more articles – most of them for Chinese Wikipedia, where he is now one of a corps of almost 80 administrators. The work of administrators is essentially to troll through the site, cleaning up pages that require it while mediating in any disputes between users relating to controversial articles on, say, Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian or the status of Tibet.
The idea is just to get them to cool off, says Chan, who advocates freezing a site’s editing capability for a few days to stifle vandalism and back-and- forth edit wars.
Chan says: We cannot show our own point-of-view in the article. That’s our policy.
Lo says he spends three hours a day on administrative work at the site, and he has seen his fair share of controversies. With so much baggage resting on Lo’s shoulders, the 21-year-old admits he has been a little stressed with all the conference planning.
But a lot of that stress, he insists, has less to do with politics and more with getting some real-world help from his online comrades.
Most of us are only present in the Internet world, but the conference is in the real world, Lo says.
We really need them to get out and help with the work.