Conflictual consensus in the Chinese version of Wikipedia

The paper examines how the recent development of the Chinese version of Wikipedia (CW) has developed to accommodate the diverse regional differences of its contributors. Although contributors are all users of the Chinese language, the orthographic, linguistic, regional and political differences among them do exist. Thus, CW has to attend to the different needs of users from four regions of origin (Mainland, Hong Kong/Macau, Taiwan, and Singapore/Malaysia). The paper shows how a technological polity is built, with an aim to accommodate regional diversity, by importing Wikipedia governance principles, implementing user-generated character conversion, and establishing the ldquoAvoid Region-Centric Policyrdquo. It has been observed that although the orthographic and lexical differences have been preserved and respected, the offline political and ideological differences seem to threaten its potential growth, especially when compared to its self-censored copycat Baidu Baike. This paper then suggests it is neither the internal conflicts nor the external competition that matters most to CW, but rather the evolution of its polity.