Chinese Wikipedia
Chinese Wikipedia
URL
http://zh.wikipedia.org/
Commercial?
No
Type of site
Internet encyclopedia
project
Registration
Optional
Available
language(s)
Chinese
Owner
Wikimedia Foundation
The Chinese Wikipedia (Chinese: ??????/???
???) is the Chinese language edition of Wiki-
pedia, run by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Started in October 2002, the Chinese Wikipe-
dia has over 250,000 articles as of April,
2009.
The site was blocked by the Government
of the People’s Republic of China[1] It has 87
administrators, including 29 from mainland
China, 18 from Taiwan, and 15 from Hong
Kong.
Chinese Wikipedia is the third largest on-
line Chinese encyclopedia after Hoodong and
Baidu Baike.
History
The 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.
It was in October 2002 that the first
Chinese-language page was written, the Main
Page. The first registered user of the Chinese
Wikipedia was Mountain. A software update
on October 27, 2002 allowed Chinese lan-
guage input. The domain was set to be
zh.wikipedia.org. On November 17, 2002,
Mountain translated the Computer science
article into zh:?????, thus creating its first
real encyclopedic article.
In order to accommodate the orthographic
differences between simplified Chinese and
traditional Chinese(or Orthodox Chinese),
from 2002 to 2003, Chinese Wikipedia com-
munity gradually decided to combine the two
originally separate versions of Chinese Wiki-
pedia. The first running automatic conversion
between the two orthographic representation
starts from December 23, 2004, with Medi-
aWiki 1.4 release. The needs from Hong
Kong and Singapore were taken into ac-
counts in MediaWiki 1.4.2 release, which
made conversion table for zh-sg default to zh-
cn, and zh-hk default to zh-tw.[2]
In its early days, most articles on the
Chinese Wikipedia were translated from the
English version. The
first
five
sysops:
zh:User:Samuel,
zh:Us