Wikipedia seeks more exposure for Beijing - when the censors relent

Wikipedia plans to help some big developing countries gain more understanding around the globe in the next five years, but China is not among them, thanks to its severe internet censorship.

The non-profit organisation hopes that, with additional resources pouring in, more content about India and Brazil can be created on its platform, one of its senior volunteer administrators says.

Chen Ting, chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation's board of trustees, told a casual gathering of several dozen users of Chinese Wikipedia in Shanghai last month that the plan could also improve the free multilingual Web encyclopaedia.

Chen said 'the number of articles introducing India and Brazil on Wikipedia is relatively small', disproportionate to the power of the two nations and the size of their populations. 'And we always want to improve the variety [of Wikipedia's content] and have some kind of balance [of information].'

By the end of last month, more than 17 million articles, in 276 languages, had been created by individual internet users on Wikipedia, making it the world's biggest and most influential online encyclopaedia.

Chen said the mainland was not a priority yet, with only 334,000 Chinese articles on Wikipedia. The number of Chinese articles ranks 12th among all languages, after Russian and Swedish and ahead of Catalan.