But first, huzzah for being 21! I bought my first alcomoholic beverages last night, and they were tasty. Good, local microbrews, a couple of good friends, and a good time. I'm not sure how I feel about this whole "aging" thing, but that is neither here nor there.
I started work at Encyclopaedia Britannica this Monday - I worked there last summer as a "fact checker", as Jimmy so frequently enjoyed commenting upon, and this summer they invited me back. I'm not sure what my technical position is, so I think that for now I'm just going to have to go with Defender of Democracy.
Why this odd burst of ideological patriotism, you ask? Mostly I'm just proud of what Britannica is doing, and I think it's spiffy that I have a part in it. In the process of getting an edition of Britannica ready for distribution in China, the Chinese powers that be have given us a number of "issues" with some articles that they want "corrected" - i.e. removed or altered, and we want to avoid as much change as possible because hey, we actually like having a reputation of intellectual objectivity and integrity. So, not surprisingly, most of these issues revolve around Taiwan, Tibet, and differing conceptions of Chinese communism, ideology, etc.
So right now, I'm going through the complaints and figuring out what are acceptable changes (a lot of terminology, such as "Tibet Autonomous Region" replacing "Tibet"), and to do some work on the more problematic ones, such as the article on "censorship". China wanted its name removed from a list of regimes which commonly employed censorship; I just about had an aneurism trying to think about that one.
The poor "Pandaren" article never stood a chance....*sniff*
Anyway, my job is to go through the problematic changes and re-word things to make them both true and accurate, so that the Chinese will allow it to go through but more importantly so that the article's integrity isn't compromised by whatever changes we make. It's not only really interesting to see what they object to, but also to actually use my brain when I'm suggesting what to do with an article. It's pretty rewarding work.
10 comments:
sounds Ministry of Truthalicious.
Yeah, doesn't it? It's pretty freaky. I'm glad Britannica isn't rolling over as easily as Google.
yeah, but I've read recently that Googles been having second thoughts about working with China, and they might pull out...
Really? Good for them, they were making WAY too many concessions.
I just got to the Dalai Lama article :) it'll be fun telling them how little we'll let them change in this one.
I sell people energy.
like energy made from people? OMG!
Matrix anyone?
Peter, I could never do what you are doing, because I dont have much interest in all of those goings-on. But it sounds pretty cool what you are doing, and I implore you to keep us updated on how the changes go, so as to increase my knowledge.
Oh yeah and, Down with Auto-Tibetans!
(Damn robots)
Thanks! Yeah I'll keep updating on this...not much development the last few days but now we're moving into the next stage of the project so let's see what happens next.
Nice that sounds like a pretty sweet job. See if you can slip a few anti China comments in there past those dirty commie bastards for good ole Uncle Sam! Where is ole Britannica located?
It's pretty dang fun, today I got to sit down with my supervisor and look over the changes I'd suggested, and with his suggestions/decisions, I finally started inputting the changes today! It looks like we're not going to budge on a lot of things, so that's good. I'm still pretty optimistic about this.
Britannica's office (I think its world HQ, actually) is downtown chicago, just north of the river on LaSalle.
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