Baike.com

"Hudong" redirects here. For the Chinese town, see Hudong, Lufeng, Guangdong.
Not to be confused with Baidu Baike.

Douyin Baike
抖音百科
Type of site
Social network with wiki-based encyclopedia, chat forums, and bulletin boards
Available inChinese
HeadquartersBeijing
OwnerByteDance
Created byPan Haidong (CEO)
URLbaike.com Edit this at Wikidata
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional (required to edit pages)
Launched19 June 2005; 20 years ago (2005-06-19)
Current statusPerpetual work-in-progress

Douyin Baike (Chinese: 抖音百科; pinyin: dǒu yīn bǎi kē), formerly known as Hudong Baike (Chinese: 互动百科, also sometimes spelled Hoodong and also known as Baike.com), is a for-profit Chinese-language user-editable online encyclopedia and social network owned by ByteDance. Founded in 2005 in emulation of Wikipedia, it is one of the two largest wikis in China, along with its more prominent rival, Baidu Baike.

Features and business model

Baike.com is a wiki and lets its users edit and contribute material. Frequent users may accumulate credits redeemable for gifts.[1] It has also included features of social networking sites, including chat forums and fan groups.[2][3] Baike.com is a for-profit business partially supported by advertising and paid support services.[2]

Hudong Baike developed its own wiki software platform, called HDWiki, as a rival to MediaWiki. It also released YELLOWIKI, a classifieds platform.[4]

The HDWiki software is free for non-commercial use, has been downloaded 200,000 times and currently supports over 1,000 other web sites in China (as of December 2007), consisting mostly of tech researchers, software groups, government, universities, and high school students.[citation needed]

Although Hudong Baike tried to branch out into software as a service, it was primarily reliant on advertising for revenue.[4]

History

Baike.com was founded in 2005 by CEO Pan Haidong[5] who had moved back to China after earning a PhD in systems engineering from Boston University in 2002.[1] Haidong acknowledged that the project was inspired by Wikipedia, stating in 2009 "Of course we are a copycat of Wikipedia", though arguing that the encyclopedia had its own distinct innovations.[6] In 2006, it obtained $3 million in funding in a financing round.[4] During the late 2000s Hudong Baike grew significantly while Chinese Wikipedia (which was founded earlier in 2002) suffered being intermittently blocked, sometimes for years at a time, by the Chinese government.[6] In 2009, Hudong Baike boasted of having 2 million articles and 1.7 million active users.[6]

In 2010, Pan Haidong made a post to Weibo entitled "Three Questions to [Baidu CEO] Robin Li", questioning the high search ranking that Baidu (the dominant search engine in China) gave to its own services, including Baidu Baike, (another user-generated Wikipedia-like encyclopedia founded in 2006[7]), over those of rival companies. Baidu sued Pan in response, with Baidu eventually winning the resulting court case, with the court ordering Pan to pay 120,000 yuan to Baidu.[8] On 22 February 2011, Baike.com submitted a complaint to the State Administration for Industry and Commerce asking for a review of the behavior of Baidu, accusing it of being monopolistic.[9]

In 2011, it was announced that Draper Fisher Jurvetson had invested $15 million into Hudong Baike.[1] In December 2012, the company changed its English name from Hudong to Baike.com.[10] In 2012, in an attempt to improve article quality, Hudong Baike convened a "Scientific Advisory Group," including several university professors among others.[4] In an attempt to increase user retention, Hudong Baike became less focused on written encyclopedia content, with its homepage increasingly featuring portals to video and picture content.[4] Hudong Baike had several controversies related to plagiarism, including in 2011 the founder of technology portal Guokr.com [zh] complaining that an article featured on Hudong Baike's front page was essentially taken wholesale without permission from an article on Guokr.com.[11][4]

At the end of the 2000s and during the 2010s, Hudong Baike struggled to compete with Baidu Baike (as well to a lesser extent Sogou Baike, another Chinese wiki encyclopedia) because it lacked search engine integration, resulting in it falling behind in users and content creation. Baike.com began offering small payments to college students to write entries. As the Chinese internet became more dependent on walled garden app ecosystems throughout the 2010s, Baike.com declined further.[4]

Between 2013 and 2015, the annual operating revenue of the company grew from 47.77 million yuan to 60.27 million yuan. In 2015, Samsung invested 16.8 million yuan into Hudong Baike. That year, the company had around 150 employees, most of which were in sales. In 2016, the shares of the company became listed on the National Equities Exchange and Quotations (NEEQ). [4]

In 2017, the company became the subject of major controversy as a result of a investigation on the China Central Television (CCTV, a Chinese government-run broadcaster) consumer rights programme "The 3.15 Show", which found that the encyclopedia had a "pay for creation" system that allowed users who paid a fee to create articles with effectively no oversight, including one advertisement-like article on an unregulated supplement which claimed to cure cancer.[12] This exposé severely damaged the credibility of Hudong Baike, causing its annual profits to plummet from 10.2805 million yuan to only 3.96 million yuan.[4]

In 2019, the company was acquired by Chinese technology conglomerate ByteDance.[13] The encyclopedia was subsequently renamed several times, being renamed to Douyin Baike in 2024 (Douyin is the Chinese version of the short-term video platform TikTok).[14][15] By the time of its acquisition by ByteDance, Baike.com was far less popular than Baidu Baike,[4] having only around 7% of Baidu Baike's daily viewership (8.6 million vs 130 million daily views).[16] In 2025, Douyin Baike was found guilty in a Beijing court of illegally copying 600,000 entries from Baidu Baike, creating fabricated user data to make it seem that this action had been done by ordinary users, and was ordered to pay 8 million yuan (the equivalent of around $1 million USD) in damages.[17]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "Why Draper Funded China's Wikipedia". Forbes. 23 August 2011.
  2. ^ a b "Information game changer", Chinadaily.com, 2011-02-24, webpage: CD6 (Archive) .
  3. ^ Fletcher, Owen (22 May 2009). "'Chinese Wikipedia' Offers Social Networking Too". PC World. Archived from the original on 26 May 2009. Retrieved 23 May 2009.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j "卖给头条的互动百科也曾是百度的死对头 | 界面 · 财经号" [Hudong Baike, which was sold to Toutiao, was once a fierce rival of Baidu.]. Jiemian News. 16 September 2019. Retrieved 28 November 2025.
  5. ^ "Hoodong: Homegrown Wiki". BV Capital Blog. BV Capital. 27 November 2007. Archived from the original on 30 November 2007. Retrieved 31 January 2009.
  6. ^ a b c "It's tricky for wikis and online encyclopedias in China - CNN.com". edition.cnn.com. Retrieved 11 January 2026.
  7. ^ "Baidu desafía a la Wikipedia en China con su nueva enciclopedia 'on line'". El Mundo (in Spanish). EFE. 12 May 2006. Archived from the original on 19 March 2020. Retrieved 19 March 2020.
  8. ^ "卖给头条的互动百科也曾是百度的死对头 | 界面 · 财经号" [Hudong Baike, which was sold to Toutiao, was once Baidu's arch-enemy]. Jiemian News. 16 September 2019. Retrieved 3 February 2025.
  9. ^ Yang, Yang (杨阳 Yáng Yáng). Translated by Guo Wei. "China's "Wikipedia" Submits Complaint about Baidu." () Economic Observer. 4 March 2011. Issue 508, Corporation, Page 28. Retrieved on 26 October 2012. Original article: "百度：我是大哥 我不叫度娘." 25 February 2011.
  10. ^ "互动百科宣布启用新域名及新版LOGO" (in Chinese). DoNews. 5 December 2012. Retrieved 21 July 2014.
  11. ^ Chunhui, Zhuang (10 March 2011). "果壳网发"谴责声明"指互动百科抄袭" [Guokr.com issued a "condemnation statement" accusing Hudong Baike of plagiarism.]. National Business Daily (每日经济新闻). Archived from the original on 26 January 2016.
  12. ^ Lai, Catherine (17 March 2017). "China's 'biggest online encyclopedia' apologises for selling fake entries on its open platform". Hong Kong Free Press.
  13. ^ Wan, Shaw (9 September 2019). "Acquisition of Baike.com Puts ByteDance on par With Rival Baidu". Pandaily. Retrieved 3 October 2022.
  14. ^ "头条百科测试版上线 启用域名baike.com" [The beta version of Toutiao Encyclopedia has been launched and is now using the domain baike.com.]. Phoenix Television (in Chinese). Retrieved 28 November 2025.
  15. ^ "品牌升级通知：识典百科正式升级为抖音百科" [Brand Upgrade Notice: Shidian Encyclopedia has officially been upgraded to Douyin Encyclopedia.]. Baike.com.
  16. ^ Xu, Tony (20 August 2019). "Bytedance takes on Baidu with investment in Wikipedia-like Hudong Baike · TechNode". TechNode. Retrieved 28 November 2025.
  17. ^ "抖音百科抓取百度百科60万词条被起诉，法院判赔800万元" [Douyin (TikTok) was sued for scraping 600,000 entries from Baidu Baike (Baidu Encyclopedia), and the court ordered it to pay 8 million yuan in damages.]. Yangcheng Evening News. 23 May 2025. Retrieved 28 November 2025.

Further reading

allikas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baike.com