[bspammer]

This makes me sad. Wikipedia is surely one of humanity's greatest accomplishments to date. Having such a resource be off limits to a large section of our population is truly depressing.

Of course, there was always the language barrier, but zh.wikipedia.org could definitely have been as high quality as the English version given the chance.

[yorwba]

Is zh.wikipedia.org not as high-quality as the English version in your experience? I don't use it that frequently, but for topics like famous Chinese people or linguistics of Sinitic languages, the English article is often just a stub, while the Chinese version has all the information I'm looking for.

[paulgerhardt]

In my experience zh.wikipedia.org is largely authored by Taiwanese residents. The quality is high but local narratives are often written with some bias not entirely unlike what one would expect from a displaced population resulting from a fairly recent civil war.

[ekianjo]

The English version of Wikipedia is not free of bias either. Wikipedia is not a source of truth for everything out there.

[madez]

When I see that articles about the same thing in different languages state different and incompatible numbers, then I always think that this is an obvious and easily solveable problem; separate the data from the language and reference it in the text. That way each language uses the same data. This shouldn't just be done with numbers, but with dates, and other easily convertible information.

Yes, this will create conflicts as to which information is correct, but Wikipedia has had this problem since forever, and deals with it.

[commoner]

This is currently being done on Wikidata for information that is more easily represented in a database.

https://www.wikidata.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata

Some infoboxes on Wikipedia have values that are automatically synced to the related Wikidata entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infobox

[ekianjo]

The problem is that most data can never be verified. A source may never be fully accurate. A source could be a bunch of BS in the worst case. Even government data and media-based data frequently contradict each others.

For recent events we have already seen large press groups spreading misinformation. So when do you know when they actually produce facts or produce biased BS? At the end of the day somebody makes a call and we know nothing of their affiliations.

[wongarsu]

Wikipedia also has a notorious problem with "sources" that are written by the same person that's editing the article.

[anoncake]

That's a horrible idea.

1. The surrounding text depends on the number it contains. By blindly replacing numbers in every language version, you get garbage like "Town A is the most populated place on the region at 10,000 inhabitants, followed by Town B at 11,000."

2. If you look at multiple language versions and they disagree, you know one of them must be incorrect and you should watch out for bias and outdated information. Forcing them to all have the same data takes away that feature.

3. Bias is rarely a problem with objectively checkable data. When the PRC publishes an encyclopedia, the issue with it is not that they'd get the date of Tiananmen Square wrong.

4. Requiring people to use and read some sort of placeholders instead of ordinary text greatly increases the barrier to entry.

[Funes-]

I only use Wikipedia as a reference guideline for specific subjects I am not knowledgeable in. It does a fairly good job at providing that kind of information.

[baybal2]

Very few Taiwanese today associate themselves with mainland. Less than 10% percent of the population were refugees two decades ago, and it is even less today, with second generation mainlanders being more or less assimilated.

[avaika]

It's not just zh / en problem. Probably it's every language problem.

Out of fun I compare some Russian vs English articles on controversial topics (e.g. Stalin / Nicholas II / etc). It's really interesting to see how it's different. In most cases it matches to the traditional point of view in native speaker community.

[dwohnitmok]

On the whole I would say the English version is better. In general articles about China tend to be pretty good (modern and ancient history, people as you pointed out) and can be richer than their English equivalents. I actually haven't found the linguistics articles about Sinitic languages to be all that helpful. My impression is that they usually have less information than their English equivalents and often have sections translated from their English counterparts (I'm fairly sure the translation is in that direction because the English is more detailed than the Chinese and the original sources are usually in English), but I suppose YMMV.

However as you get into the various sciences, the quality and coverage of articles drops off very quickly.

I also find that the tone of the articles can also veer off a little bit from the usual encyclopedia-detached tone of Wikipedia (at least somewhat more so than the English version)

I still prefer it to Baidu's online encyclopedia, but it's not as excellent as the English version.