The Chinese Wikipedia (traditional Chinese: 中文維基百科; simplified Chinese: 中文维基百科

; pinyin: Zhōngwén Wéijī Bǎikē) is the Standard Chinese language edition of Wikipedia. It is run by
the Wikimedia Foundation. Started on 11 May 2001,[1] the Chinese Wikipedia currently has about
1,083,000 articles and about 2,849,000 registered users, of which 84 have administrative privileges.
The Chinese Wikipedia has been blocked in Mainland China since May 2015.[2]

Contents

 1History
 2Naming
 3Topics
 4Community
o 4.1Origin of edits
o 4.2Origin of readers
o 4.3Administrators
o 4.4Meetings
o 4.5Systemic bias
 5Automatic conversion between traditional and simplified Chinese characters
o 5.1Original situation
o 5.2Solution
 6Differences with other versions of Wikipedia
 7Wikipedia in other varieties of Chinese
 8Blocking of Wikipedia
o 8.1First block
o 8.2Second block
o 8.3Third block and temporary unblocks
o 8.4Fourth block
o 8.5Fifth block
 9Self-censorship allegations
 10Competitors
 11See also
o 11.1Wikipedia articles
o 11.2Meta-wiki articles
 12References
 13External links

History[edit]
A person browsing the Chinese Wikipedia on a touchscreen device.
Th ane Chinese Wikipedia was established along with 12 other Wikipedias in May 2001. At the
beginning, however, the Chinese Wikipedia did not support Chinese characters, and had no
encyclopedic content.
In October 2002, the first Chinese-language page was written, the Main Page. A software update on
27 October 2002 allowed Chinese language input. The domain was set to be zh.wikipedia.org,
with zh based on the ISO code for the Chinese language. On 17 November 2002, the user Mountain
translated the Computer science article into zh:计算机科学, thus creating its first real encyclopedic
article.
In order to accommodate the orthographic differences between simplified Chinese
characters and traditional Chinese characters (or Orthodox Chinese), from 2002 to 2003, the
Chinese Wikipedia community gradually decided to combine the two originally separate versions of
the Chinese Wikipedia. The first running automatic conversion between the two orthographic
representations started on 23 December 2004, with the MediaWiki 1.4 release. The needs from
Hong Kong and Singapore were taken into account in the MediaWiki 1.4.2 release, which made the
conversion table for zh-sg default to zh-cn, and zh-hk default to zh-tw.[3]
In its early days, most articles on the Chinese Wikipedia were translated from the English version.
The first five sysops, or administrators, were promoted on 14 June 2003.
Wikipedia was first introduced by the mainland Chinese media[citation needed] in the newspaper China
Computer Education on 20 October 2003, in the article, "I join to write an encyclopedia" (我也来写百
科全书).[4] On 16 May 2004, Wikipedia was first reported by Taiwanese media in the
newspaper China Times. Since then, many newspapers have published articles about the Chinese
Wikipedia, and several sysops have been interviewed by journalists.
Ivan Zhai of the South China Morning Post wrote that the blocks from the Mainland authorities in the
2000s stifled the growth of the Chinese Wikipedia, and that by 2013 there was a new generation of
users originating from the Mainland who were taking efforts to make the Chinese Wikipedia grow. In
2013, there were 1.4 million registered users on the Chinese Wikipedia, and in July 2013 7,500 of
these users were active, with most of them originating from Hong Kong and Taiwan. 715,000 entries
for the Chinese Wikipedia, making it the 12th largest Wikipedia.[5]