Why does wikipedia have comparatively little information on China?

by CDWEBI

Not sure whether it's the right subreddit but I try.

I like reading history of places on wikipedia from time to time and I noticed that generally history on China is very surface level.

For example, when I wikipedia some semi-big cities in Europe, I usually get a quite in depth description of it. Maybe it is some sort of confirmation bias, but that does not seem to be the case with China.

For example Guangzhou. If I understand correctly, it was quite the important city throughout Chinese history, yet when reading their wikipedia it feels like it is equal to some unimportant European city, if one compares the content.

Is Wikipedia simply biased towards Europe or do we really simply have less information on the details of China?

If it is the second, is it because China was relatively peaceful in the grand scheme of things compared to Europe? For example, various regions in Europe had internal fights for power and when there emerged a regional hegemon, they still had to compete with other European regions. Thus in a way there was much more to write about. Or does this view overly simplify China?

Lord0fHats

This is more of a Wikipedia question than anything, but there's some history related stuff here so I'll take a stab at it.

There's two things to understand about Wikipedia that relate to your question:

  • Wikipedia is written by volunteer contributors using reliable secondary sources. I'll set aside how well Wikipedia succeeds at that goal, but that is the stated goal. This means that when you edit Wikipedia, you need to source your edits and those edits are intended to be relevant secondary sources that are considered reliable. In the case of history articles, the first sources to be used are published histories written by amateur and professional historians.
  • Wikipedia editors are rarely subject matter experts. That's a big part of why the above is a standard on Wikipedia. The editors aren't supposed to substitute their own 'expertise' for a citation to a reliable secondary source. Again, I'll set aside how well Wikipedia succeeds at that goal. It's a bit outside the scope.

Now, having said that yes. Articles on Chinese history on the English Language Wikipedia can be pretty threadbare, and the answer is in the name!

English Language Wikipedia.

Now, I'm not going to say there's not much written history on China in the West... but there isn't. To clarify, there are a lot of scholars of Chinese history in the West, but that scholarship has very limited scope, mostly to the more modern age and European colonization.

There is very little history written about China, a country with 5000 years of history, in the English language that is easily available to the public. There's plenty of articles but a lot of those are locked behind paywalls and in scholarly journals. Published books that you can find in a library or online can be limited, usually to 'big book' histories with broad scopes focused on the big picture. There's definitely a big void of hard knuckled investigative history on China in the English language and very few Chinese histories have been translated.

Generally the Wikipedias prefer to use the same language for their sources. That way the editors can check citations, ostensibly. As a result, Wikipedia will at best only ever reflect two things: the interest of its editors who spend time writing its content and the availability of source material in the language they are using.

The reason Chinese history articles will often seem limited and threadbare, is because the available source base and probably editor interest, is equally threadbare. You could call this a bias. I think a better term is limitation. Even if the editors wanted to build more detailed and robust articles, the source base just isn't there for them to use right now.

China has as deep and complex a history as anywhere else, but Wikipedia can only ever reflect available sourcing and editor interest.