Having attended the World Internet Conference hosted by the Chinese government, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales may have felt he was making progress with the notoriously non-progressive internet censors in the country.
Indeed, he told China Real Time that a meeting with the ruling Communist Party’s tech lead Lu Wei ahead of the event had felt like a “small beginning”.
He may have been surprised then to see his own comments made there had been edited when translated into Chinese – on his prized, crowdsourced encyclopedia.
At the conference, Wales said:
We will see, not perfect, but very much improved machine translation, which will very much enhance person-to-person communication worldwide. This will be a very powerful thing. I believe as a result of this, the idea that any one government can control the flow of information of what people know in their territory will become completely antiquated and no longer possible.
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Which was translated to:
Probably we will see improved machine translation, which will very much enhance person-to-person communication. And also the government could conduct good analysis on people’s communication in various relevant areas.
In our previous piece on the event, we noted that Wales would be heading to China, as well as a team from Nokia and cofounder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman.
Also in attendance at the controversial gathering were execs from Microsoft, Apple and Netflix.
➤ Anti-Wikipedian Translation At China’s Internet Conference [Wall Street Journal]
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