Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2013/Documentation/Nemin Wang

Session: Nemin Wang // Editor diversity on Chinese Wikipedia

Abstract

Although Taiwan does not have the same population level as mainland China, 39% of all editors on Chinese Wikipedia come from Taiwan. Only 19% of them come from mainland China and 26% come from Hong Kong. These facts result in a really special editing environment. Neutral point of view has become more important and popular than verifiability and original research. The central question is: How do people with different ideologies improve Wikipedia?

Starting point / Insights

China population is 97%, others (hong kong etc is 3%)
Traffic to Wikipedia, China is only 36% source

Challenges

editors from many countries and regions (China, Taiwan, HK, etc)
competitor: baidu,
censorship
idea identity (people don't care about copyright)
tolerance on diversity (not always friendly with people from Taiwan, Hong Kong)

Baidu competes with wikipedia for participation.

Setup at 2006
Commerical website
Edit only show when censored (safe)
Advertisements
No copyright checking
Information unorganized
Only simplified chinese
Recognized by gov
Unrelated with sensitive project (wikileaks)
Easy info, source
Supported by other baidu products
Copy content from wikipedia

in 2006 wikipedia was blocked > available in 2008 baidu already had a foothold

Linguistic challenges: Simplified and traditional Chinese have many differences, so there is a need for switching between versions.

Ideas

Chinese Wikipedia supports language variants (convert between simple and traditional). Setup environmnent on wikipedia: respect, compromise, rules, tolerance

Goals:

improve age diversity (mainly 18-28)
engage female editors (currently 90% male), only 3-4 female admins
get people from more professions or academic fields

Chinese social media site weibo.com - doing outreach there, post article abstracts to raise awareness in China in general (funded by Individual Engagement Grant). Potential to diversify community?

Questions / Next steps recommendations

Q: Conversation in chinese wikimedia community about diversity? A: Community is less focused on that, there are political pressures for offline activiites and outreach, and the community is more focused on that (political safety, etc)

Q: Do you have clue as to what articles you have are the articles people are looking for? subjects are what people (readers) seek? A: Don't know (talk to Sumana!)

Q: Are you hopeful to be able to close gap between baidu and wikipedia? A: Baidu is for profit. Mobile wikipedia traffic is growing. Wikipedia has contributions by bots.

Q: Theory of change is the offline events would help promote diversity, but people are worried about attending offline events, correct? are there online spaces that would also help? A: nline access is more difficult, baidu search engine doesn't take people to wikipedia. offline activities can help spread awereness.

Q: People are afraid to meet personally? A: Actually that is okay, with people he already knows but not with strangers, general audience -- there is some fear.

Q: Can that fear be reduced? A: He held offline activities since 2009, he is fine, others can see that

Q: About subversive orgs needing to maintain balance (do stuff, not attract notice of government), it seems that really long on ramps that include activities that no one (incl. government) can't obect A: Government is monitoring them. They are not anti-government, just wants to improve Wikipedia