Baidu Baike （百度百科） Dictionary?

[Tatarik - 晨星]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering whether it would be interesting/doable to make a dictionary out of the Baidu Baike entries ?

When I don't find a specific idiom/entry in any of the dictionary I have purchased, my last recourse usually is a Baidu search and I eventually find it on Baidu Baike. Since it's a free resources (correct me if I'm wrong), why not scrap it and make a dictionary out of it?

Cheers,
T.

 

[mikelove]

Not possible, I'm afraid - it's free but not open-source, scraping it would be a violation of their copyrights. We could make (and indeed are considering making) a dictionary out of Chinese Wikipedia, but not Baike.

 

[Tatarik - 晨星]

Okay, spot on. It's not open-source. :-/
Thanks Mike.

The Wikipedia dictionary is an exciting prospect!
Is there already a target date that you can share?

 

[mikelove]

I should also add that there are accusations of widespread plagiarism / theft on Baike - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/Baidu_Baike for example - so I would be somewhat reluctant to use it even if it were open-source for fear of participating in infringement of somebody else's copyright.

No specific target data for Wikipedia, we haven't even totally committed to doing it since we might run into some unanticipated roadblocks when we try - right now we're just trying to get 3.1 finished on Android since then we'll have both platform versions of Pleco using the same database format again.

 

[Tatarik - 晨星]

Very interesting link. Sticking to clear terms of use with Wikipedia might be preferable.