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.
We tracked down yan, one of them. he lives abroad now, but used 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 of
But in my experience, the pro beijing editors are a lot more aggressive in droning up this information. it s now unfixable without external interference because they are trying to rewrite history. while these editors may use state registered e mails and vpns to get across the internet that s otherwise banned in china, john says it s not a straightforward situation of beijing ordering the edits. there seems to be an overflow of patriotism in china and these changes are being carried out by people loyal to the communist party, but they are not paid for by the government and they are not all based in china, either. and in contrast tojohn in hong kong, there are others continuing their work editing wikipedia articles both in english and in chinese, but importantly from the safety of another country. dave lives in britain but as a pro democracy editor, he fears for his family and friends back home, so he spoke to us anonymously. when i started doing my edits, pro beijing editors
How real the situation is on the ground right now, we asked our bbc hong kong correspondent danny vincent to dig deeper. i met someone we re going to call john , who continues to edit articles on wikipedia relating to important events in hong kong s recent past, so a balanced viewpoint is presented. we gathered in a neutral location and under the cover of darkness. since the introduction of beijing s national security law, wikipedia seems to have become a much more hostile place. pro beijing people often remove content that is sympathetic to the protests tear gas being fired, image of barricades and the like. they also add their own content. pro democracy editors tend to add content to shift the balance or the tone of the article.
So carl and danny have teamed up to ask whether wikipedia s open knowledge goals are really compatible with a world where different countries have different views on the truth. stephen mcdonell: tear gas, which is being fired. you can see from above behind them, the riot police have these two water cannon trucks. in hong kong, beijing has been clamping down on descent since the start of the protests in 2019. the clashes between the police and pro democracy demonstrators may have subsided for now, at least. but the same cannot be said for the online world, where the battle for the narrative still continues. furious edit wars have been raging behind the scenes on wikipedia between pro democracy and pro beijing points of view. our team of investigators have spent weeks looking into these edits, mostly in chinese languages but also some in english. this article is about