it s time fof click. this week hong kong is changing and so is its wikipedia entry, but who is responsible? bringing the vikings to life for schools. and, i mean, how many ljs do you need on a song? for many of us, wikipedia embodies the true spirit of the internet an enormous source of information created, edited and policed by volunteers around the world. and while it s certainly possible to tweak an entry about yourself or your company to add some facts ,
the encyclopaedia s community of editors and fact checkers have been famously hot on dragging you back to earth should you big yourself up too much. hmm. but over the last couple of years, we ve uncovered evidence that some of wikipedia s articles are being changed to present a particular country in a more positive light and that s china. you remember what carl millerfound when we sent him to taiwan? yes articles about taiwan s independence were being edited to swing more in line with china s view. although carl did point out that these views are not lies after all, who is wikipedia to override the opinions of many people in the most populous country in the world? well, now, a click investigation has found evidence that wikipedia articles about hong kong are also being changed to be more pro china, and the situation has escalated to the point where wikipedia s governing body has suspended several pro beijing editors for abusing the platform.
to organise events in china, teaching citizens there how to edit wikipedia. he denies misusing the platform and says that the removal of active pro beijing editors is detrimental to the neutrality of wikipedia as a whole. wikipedia, especially chinese wikipedia, is a balance that anti beijing forces and the pro beijing forces must maintain a balance and people agree on a compromise in order for the project to proceed. and the thing is you re removing one side from you re removing the pro beijing voices for from this platform and of course, the balance is going to tilt towards the anti beijing forces within wikipedia. as it turns out and i have deep experience talking to people all over the world and meeting wikimedians the idea that people in china, for example, are so brainwashed that they can t even conceive of the idea of neutrality is just completely false. so many people are able to say ok, here s my view
we are going to do basically use all wikipedia s content chinese wikipedia s content and we build a mirror site, we build a fort of wikipedia in china. it is going to be better than wikipedia s current competitors in china because we are providing unintelligible information from just unintelligible from wikipedia in china and people will have a better platform to actually write about encyclopaedia articles. the biggest thing that s preventing mainland chinese people from expressing the viewpoint of mainland china s people is the chinese government who don t allow them to edit wikipedia, so the idea that we are somehow excluding china is absurd we welcome with open arms our editors from china. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that the us became the world s largest bitcoin miner after regulations banning the practice have taken effect in china. defence company ghost robotics added an assault rifle to a robot dog.
in a transport station. there were allegations that these men both had triad connections but were also in cooperation with the police, ultimately backed by beijing. but on the chinese wikipedia page of the incident, the second of these pictures was removed and then two days later, well over 100 further edits was made to the page. changes were being thrown back and forth between words such as rural factions to terrorists or conflict replacing terror attack . but worse still, the edit wars seem to have taken a nasty term there are reports of threats being made to editors who are contributing what are at least seem to be pro democracy edits. messages on private chat channels were designed to strike fear which led to seven pro beijing editors being banned from the site, some for the threatening messages and some accused of propagandising in the chinese narrative. these are edits that usually look at the event from a western prism and what chinese editors deem biased. but to get a