Be honest, I have spent months on the study of Chinese Web2.0 market and chatting with quite a few chinese startups. However, there is one core thing I never tried to explore, the WIKI market in China. I thought the MediaWIKI system had dominated this market in world-wide (for example the first ever (launched in Oct, 2003) Chinese WIKI site CNIC.org is built on top of it), and the Chinese version of Wikepedia is also my favorite. So that is the end of it, that is why I stepped away.
But yesterday, I realized I was blind on this (shame!). Thanks to Pan HaiDong (I called him the Ph.D of Chinese WIKI according to his name and his job, ^_^) , the founder of Hoodong.com which has become the largest Chinese WIKI site. Pan approached me on Skype, brought me to his WIKI wonderland, Hoodong.com and introduced to me its new product, the first Open Source Chinese WIKI system HoodongWIKI v1.0 beta.
‘The MediaWIKI system is very robust and reliable, but its design and setting can hardly please the Chinese user’, Pan said, ‘but the HoodongWIKI is designed and optimised for Chinese’.
I am not going to draw a conclusion now to say that the Chinese will love HoodongWIKI more than any other WIKI platform, but there is no doubt that this will for sure boost the Chinese WIKI market and we are going to see much more Chinese WIKIer sharing their ideas and knowledge on this new toy.
More stories about Hoodong.com and HoodongWIKI will come later.
I won’t call HoodongWiki open source, there is no licence at all. Not to say there is no revision control system like SVN or CVS, no docs for developers. I think it just want to label it as “Open Source” to attract more attention outside.
Thanks a lot for the article and comments. Sorry for the delay due to disconnection caused by the Taiwan earthquake.
HoodongWiki is still at its very early stage to say “open source”. Open source development in China is way behind US. We made the first move and would like to go ahead in this direction to make it easier for more users to setup wiki applications. Your comments and advice are most welcomed.