How to make wikipedia authoritative
I brought along my new U of M business cards to get Chinese printed on the back. How to translate “Michigan” and “Ann Arbor” are somewhat controversial. Often different characters are used for Michigan the University (密西根大学) and Michigan the State (密歇根洲), which seems odd. I heard before leaving that the U of M President, Mary Sue Coleman, had gone with “密歇根”.
Ann Arbor is translated in various ways, as well, and I ended up going with “安阿伯” because “阿伯” is at least a word. [And no, none of these make any sense].
I was consulting with a collaborator here and we looked on the Internet to see how these words were represented. [useful tip: look for an English language word or phrase on a Chinese language website; some of them will have a translation into Chinese]. My friend recommended using wikipedia as the authoritative source, something I don’t think any of my American friends would have said. Wikipedia is blocked here, but enough shows up in Google caches that you can get answers to questions like mine. So blocking Wikipedia may serve to lend it an air of authority that it would otherwise lack.
The next morning I met a U.S. science education professor at breakfast who was quite pleased with the Chinese censorship of Wikipedia and other sites. He said that U.S. biology teachers can’t send their students to the internet because all of the user-friendly, attractive, and highly-linked sites are based on religious alternatives to evolution.
What I’ve noticed most often is that that the vagaries of the internet get attributed to censorship, because when you try to reach a site and can’t it could be due to explicit blocking. Or it could be due to the general unreliability of the internet. And there’s not a good way to distinguish them.