Baidu Baike

Baidu Encyclopedia (; translation: Baidu Encyclopedia) is a Chinese language collaborative Web-based encyclopedia provided by the Chinese search engine Baidu. Like Baidu itself, the encyclopedia is heavily self-censored in line with government regulations.

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 July 2011, Baidu Baike has more than 3.5 million articles, about ten times more than the Chinese Wikipedia.

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."

Functions

The site is an open Internet encyclopedia espousing equality, collaboration, and sharing. 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...
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