Baidu Baike (; , also known as BaiduWiki internationally) is a semi-regulated Chinese-language collaborative online encyclopedia owned by the Chinese technology company Baidu. Modelled after Wikipedia, it was launched in April 2006. it claims more than 30 million entries and around 8.03 million editors – the largest number of entries of any Chinese-language online encyclopedia. Baidu Baike has been criticised for its censorship, copyright violations, commercialist practices and unsourced or inaccurate information.Xia Huosong, Wang Ruixin. 百度百科用户参与行为与参与动机关系的实证研究 (An Empirical Study on the Impact of Baidu Baike Entry Features on Knowledge Sharing Willingness). Research in Science of Science. December 2010.
History Baidu Baike was created by Baidu founder Robin Li, and was released to the public around 20 April 2006, following the Chinese government's decision to censor Wikipedia in 2005. After 20 days, it had more than 300,000 registered users and more than 100,000 articles, surpassing the number in Chinese Wikipedia.
During the conference WWW2008 of the World Wide Web Consortium, Baidu's William Chang said, "There is, in fact, no reason for China to use Wikipedia ... It's very natural for China to make its own products." When searching with the search engine Baidu, the link to the corresponding entry in Baidu Baike, if it exists, will be put as the first result or one of the first results. (Chinese) The Chinese government has, through the Great Firewall, blocked access to all editions of Wikipedia since 2019.
In 2015, the "Baike Youming" service was launched, a paid commercial service that allowed figures such as entrepreneurs and artists to control their biographies and provide personally verified information.
In March 2021, Chinese netizens claimed that South Korean netizens changed their entries related to Chinese history on a large scale through the historical version comparison function of Baidu Baike. Baidu Baike stipulates that the historical version function is only available to users of the "Baike Expert Group" with a level 4 encyclopedia and a pass rate of over 85% and professional users with a level 6 encyclopedia and a pass rate of over 85%. Open, ordinary users no longer have the right to view historical versions of entries and use the historical version comparison function. Baidu Encyclopedia officially claims that this is to "ensure that the majority of netizens obtain the accuracy of entry information and avoid interference from outdated information in various historical versions".
On 24 April 2024, Baidu posted an announcement on Baidu Baike that it would end support for the Baidu Baike dedicated mobile app on 30 June to focus on "better user experiences". Also in 2024, it was announced that AI features would be integrated into the platform.
As of 2024, Baidu Baike had over 27 million articles, with its homepage drawing 295 million views a month. Baidu Baike reached 30 million articles in 2025. In the mid 2020s, Baidu Baike faced challenges from large language model-based AI assistants supplanting the need for users to consult Baidu Baike for information, as part of a broader decline in traffic to text-based web content.
In February 2026, Baidu Baike launched BaiduWiki, an international version of Baidu Baike available in English, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Russian, with over 1 million articles available at launch, which had been translated from the original Chinese versions with the help of AI tools. The launch of BaiduWiki marks the expansion of Baidu's single-language version to a Chinese version and an international multilingual version.
Features
Baidu has officially described Baidu Baike as an information repository provided by the company for internet users. The platform promotes the principles of "equality, collaboration, sharing, and freedom." Only registered users can edit the articles. Baidu Baike is integrated with Baidu's search engine, and when a searched term has a corresponding entry on Baidu Baike, the link to that entry is typically prioritized at the top of the search results. In April 2024, Baidu shut down the Baidu Baike mobile app, but not the encyclopedia itself.
Editing Baidu Baike articles requires registration of an account, and all edits are at least nominally reviewed prior to publication. A 2016 article in Securities Times suggested that the review process is for the most part machine automated.
In Baidu Baike's articles, headings, bolding text styles and hyperlinks to other entries are supported. Each heading can be listened to (; ) separately. The references that are used are listed at the bottom of each page. The site supports editing, commenting, printing articles and viewing an article's history.Users can access multiple editing functions, including: an image upload system where files weighing less than 2MB can be added to encyclopedia articles; a categorization system called "open category", where an article can be categorized into up to 5 categories; and a separate edit box for notes, references and external links. Topics referred to by multiple names have articles at the most common titles, with other names being redirected to the article. Words or phrases with multiple meanings often have only a single article which covers all of the topics. Many (but not all) articles have infoboxes containing important information, similar to Wikipedia.
Baidu Baike has a system of ranking articles as "high quality" after undergoing review.
Baidu does not allow the encyclopedia to update between 23:00 and 8:30 Beijing time, ostensibly for the health of the encyclopedia's volunteers, but this may actually be to ease management of the auditing process for edits.
Prior to 2018 Baidu Baike lacked an equivalent of Wikipedia talk pages for individual articles. Discussion pages for individual Baidu Baike articles was later implemented in November 2018. Prior to this (as well as after), discussion between Baidu Baike users took place on Baidu Tieba, another Baidu service.
By 2014, Baidu Baike was assigning QR codes to individual articles, allowing Baidu Baike articles to be linked from physical locations. By 2016, nearly 100,000 physical Baidu Baike QR codes had been placed in over 200 locations across China.
Around 2016 Baidu Baike allowed users to send virtual "flowers" on the biographies of celebrities, with the number of flowers being used to collate a ranking of their popularity. In 2016, Baidu Baike implemented "Miaodong Baike", a feature allowing users to create 1 minute long short-form videos for articles to summarise their contents. More than 50,000 videos were uploaded 100 days after launch, and the view count for Miaodong Baike had grown from 7 million daily views at the start of 2018 to 50 million views per day by the end of that year. In 2024, an AI chatbot was added allowing users to have simulated conversations with historical figures. As part of the 2020s AI boom, by 2026 AI began to be used in the drafting process for articles, particularly in certain topics such as medicine. It also launched "Dynamic Encyclopedia" (动态百科) which provided interactive elements, such as an interactive model of the Solar System with orbits that updated to match the current time.
Copyright The copyright policy is outlined on the Help page in the terms of use section. In it, Baidu states that by adding content to the site, users agree to waive the copyright of their contributions to Baidu. It also states that the content must not violate intellectual property law and that content using the Creative Commons and/or GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) must respect the limitations of such licenses. Despite this, Baidu has received criticism for violating the GFDL license when using content directly from Wikipedia, infringing copyright on Hudong.com and tending to plagiarize other sites.
Community Like other online encyclopedias, a relatively small proportion of the users contribute the majority of the content. According to a survey published in 2011, the majority of responding editors (72.2%) were male, and 66.7% of the contributors were between the ages of 18 and 35, with only 4.8% over the age of 45. A survey published in 2017 found broadly similar demographics, with most editors reporting having a high level of income and at least a bachelor's degree. There are a few organized groups within the Baidu Baike community. The Baike Elite Team consists of about 340 core contributors that are directed by Baidu and serve as community liaisons. There is also a group of campus ambassadors made of students and an expert team with over 2,500 members, including university professors. Baidu Baike has a hierarchical structure, where users accrue "experience credits" via editing and creating articles, reaching a higher rank at certain experience point levels, with 15 ranks total as of 2014. Alongside experience points, users also accumulate "gift points" for the same actions, which allow users to acquire physical goods (ranging from cheap items like snacks and stationery, all the way up to electronic appliances like fridges, washing machines and smartphones) from Baidu with the accrued points. Users who have achieved 2,500 experience points and have the vast majority (>85%) of their edits approved by Baidu can be manually elevated by Baidu employees to the rank of "core" user, giving them special privileges (such as having a logo on their ID marking them as a core user), with groups of "core users", forming "tadpole teams". Members of "tadpole teams" are allowed to have their own workspaces, similar to Wikipedia user pages.
Like other wikis, participants of Baidu Baike become embroiled in edit wars due to conflicts over article content.
Baidu Baike allows expert editors such as academics to verify their real identity.
As of 2024, it has around 7.7 million registered users.
Influence and partnerships Baidu Baike ranks highly in the search results of Baidu's flagship search engine, the dominant search engine in the Chinese market, which contributes greatly to its popularity. Baidu Baike is widely used within China, often where people go first to look up information. It has been cited in thousands of academic papers, though considerably less so than Wikipedia or the Encyclopædia Britannica. Baidu Baike engages in partnerships with cultural institutions in China and abroad to digitize cultural heritage. In late 2017, Baidu signed an agreement in China to create "2,000 online digital museums" in the next three years. In early 2018, partnerships were expanded to cover 1,000 Spanish cities and tourist sites, including the Camino de Santiago, the Sagrada Família and the Prado Museum. In 2022, it collaborated with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology and Chinese Academy of Sciences to create articles about several fossil fish species from China.
Baidu Baike has widely been used as training data for major large language models.
Reception Baidu Baike has been praised for the great quantity of information it contains, but it has been criticised for being censored (which is mandated by the Chinese government), copyright violations as well as a lack of accuracy and commercialisation.
Censorship