Mao Zedong

internet - Wikipedians divided on Mao Zedong

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been praised for not giving in to demands to adjust its content to the wishes of the Chinese government, while Google, Yahoo and Microsoft adhered to the demand for censorship.
The truth is not that simple, shows Howard French in the International Herald Tribune. French compared section of the English and Chinese wikipedia, on Mao Zedong and other sensitive issues, and discovered big differences.

Switch to Wikipedia in Chinese, and one discovers a very different man. There, Mao Zedong's reputation is unsullied by any mention of a death toll in the great purges of the 1950s and 1960s, or for what many historians call the greatest famine in human history.

Different editors write the entries for different languages and the Chinese edition reflects the state of mind of its editors, often not aware that their viewpoint has been distorted. Those difference are most likely not limited to the Chinese edition only, but it makes you wonder how global this internet project really is.
Andrew Lih, who is currently in Beijing writing about about Wikipedia, is struggling with the issue:

I don’t doubt it’s hard for PRC folks to write critically of Mao. It’s too out of bounds, too much against their conditioning, even under a cloak of anonymous editing.
What about Chinese Wikipedia editors outside the PRC? Do they provide a counter-balance? Even armed with the full range of facts, you have to be pretty brave or determined to face the contentuous edit wars that would ensue.

Andrew Lih is not the only one pondering about the issue.