[6] Baidu Baike has been criticised for its censorship, copyright violations, commercialist practices and unsourced or inaccurate information.

Baidu Baike was founded by Robin Li in April 2006, following the Chinese government's decision to censor Wikipedia in 2005.

[13] 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 ...

[29][2] In 2016 Baidu Baike also implemented a feature allowing users to create short videos for articles to summarise their contents.

[32][irrelevant citation] 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.

[25] A survey published in 2017 found broadly similar demographics, with most editors reporting having a high level of income and at least a batchelors degree.

The Baike Elite Team consists of about 340 core contributors that are directed by Baidu and serve as community liaisons.

[10] Like other wikis, participants of Baidu Baike become embroiled in edit wars due to conflicts over article content.

[38] 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.

[39][40] 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.

[41] Baidu Baike has been praised for the great quantity of information it contains,[42] but it has been criticised for being censored (which is mandated by the Chinese government),[43] copyright violations [43][44] as well as a lack of accuracy and commercialisation.

"[45] More broadly, the review process has been criticised as opaque and arbitrary, with seemingly uncontentious edits being rejected by Baidu for unclear reasons.

[10] In 2007, Florence Devouard, then Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, said that "They [Baidu Baike] do not respect the license at all, [...] That might be the biggest copyright violation we have.

[43] In addition to copying Wikipedia, some Baidu Baike users plagiarise newspaper reporting or content from internet sites to create articles.

[10][11] In addition to copyright concerns, criticism of Baidu Baike mainly focuses on its academic merits and lack of neutrality.

The former is manifested in the lack of detailed and clear source references for the entries it contains, leading to the accuracy of its content being questioned.

[42] Baidu Baike has many entries on topics that would not be considered notable by Wikipedia standards,[7] with an article in the People's Daily from 2016 stating that the website had many "junk" entires.

[10] In a 2017 article in The Point, Chenxin Jiang unfavourably compared Baidu Baike's reliability to Wikipedia, stating that the website was a "virtual quagmire of arbitrary opinions and what one might call fake facts."

and that "much of [Baidu Baike's content] is bizarre or just plain wrong", noting several instances of clear errors or dubious unsourced information (including a fake quote from Bill Clinton describing Obama as "the worst president in American history"), some of which were widely copied by other Chinese websites.

[33] Students often treat the information contained in Baidu Baike uncritically, despite its issues with reliability,[33] though its content is considered with skepticism by many members of the general public.

In a 2018 journal article, Florian Schneider considered the Baidu Baike article on the Nanjing Massacre better written than its Chinese Wikipedia counterpart, but noted that it displayed an overt nationalistic bias, and (in contrast to the Chinese Wikipedia entry) largely omitted the academic controversy over the number of casualties, supporting the higher casualty numbers preferred by the PRC government.

[10][11] Around 2012, a list was created for "10 prestigious schools in China", which became the subject of controversy and edit warring, with universities being added or removed by individual editors who wished to promote their alma mater.

[58][11] In 2017, the article on Aristolochic acid was criticised after it erroneously described the substance as having "anti-cancer" properties when it was actually carcinogenic (cancer-causing).

[64] According to Zhang (2014), Baidu Baike suffers from having a large number of hoax articles, which are often disguised spoofs of political events.

A notable example is the "High Speed Rail" hoax from 2010, in which a fictitious Chinese professor was claimed to oppose China's high-speed-rail using the same speech style as a prominent real opponent of the Three Gorges Dam project, claiming that a ficitious "Xiaerxiefu force" and "Steven King effect" made high-speed rail extremely dangerous.

After the hoax went viral elsewhere on the Chinese internet, it was quickly incorporated in the Baidu Baike's high speed rail article.

The "National Development and Reform Commission" subsequently put out a warning that the information was fake and that the individual did not hold the positions claimed.

[70] In 2011, Baidu was sued by writer Zhang Yiyi for his Baidu Baike entry containing what he considered outdated, incorrect and defamatory content, including claiming that he was "good at self-hype in a shameless way that makes things out of nothing and attracts disdain, in order to achieve the purpose of attracting people's attention".

Also in 2015, Chinese comedian Xu Deliang sued over allegations that he "never graduated from college and did not write his own material" being repeatedly inserted into his biography.