As of right now (1:39pm EST, 13 December 2012), the total number of visitors from China to the blog since our 15 November re-boot at the new server ranks 16th. I hope that ranking will improve as the word gets out of our new accessibility, and current plans to solicit guest-posts from more China-based scholars come to fruition. Please help us to spread the word, and let any of the administrators know if you have ideas that might help, or any other suggestions for the future of the blog. (Or just post them here as comments.) Thanks!
Possibly helpful: put some apt Chinese phrases on the blog where Baidu can catch them. Maybe each of the search tag options for new posts could be bilingual?
Thanks Bill. I just did that with Chinese Philosophy, which is the default category for all posts and which almost never gets taken off the post by contributors who post. That should catch the tag for nearly all posts on the blog.
More: I’ve modified the informational header below the blog title to: “Chinese and Comparative Philosophy 中国哲学与比较哲学.” Start your search engines!
Lookin’ good! Baidu does its own conversion between the two kinds of character, but maybe you want to include both for political reasons.
My guess is that the Chinese phrases that would be most effective in Baidu are the least general ones.
Will there eventually be Chinese-language or partly translated posts?
A fine question. Manyul and I talked a bit about this some time ago, and I believe our view was (Manyul, correct me if I’m misremembering) that original Chinese-language posts and Chinese-language comments are welcome, though we expect English to remain as the main language of the blog and we foresee no ability to provide translation. Basically, we feel that it is important that the blog remain largely accessible to non Chinese readers, but also that various types of exceptions make sense.
So, for example, it might be that a given Chinese scholar would only feel comfortable posting in Chinese but is perfectly capable of reading comments in English, and might respond to comments in either language. We are very open to others’ thoughts on this subject!
Yes, that’s as I recall as well. There’s probably some imperialist/orientalist politics built into our historical situation, I realize. By “our” I mean that of the blog as well as of the tradition of Chinese philosophy scholarship in which many participants in the blog have been trained. The object of study is Chinese philosophy but we’re approaching from the subjectivity of the West’s interest in it, and so forth. That’s not meant as a justifying excuse or explanation. I apologize, personally, for that aspect of my interest in Chinese philosophy. It is what it is and given only one lifetime, I can’t do much about my own situation.
I think we would like to provide a good forum for contributors who are more comfortable blogging in Chinese. If anyone has a healthy sense of generosity to the field and is willing to do some volunteer translating work, contact us.
If we ever go the route of selling advertising space on the blog, it would only be for the purpose of generating a compensation fund for things like that. That discussion is on hold for now, however.
This policy seems right to me. Maybe on the home page, under a bilingual title, we should have a brief policy paragraph in Chinese, including a reminder that posts in Chinese or in difficult Chinese may be hard for many American philosophers, who may not specialize in Chinese philosophy, to read.
I’ll send out an announcement through a mailing list I’ve been maintaining, the members of which are scholars doing Chinese philosophy in “Greater China” (sovereignty issue not intended). I hope it will help a little.
Now tied for 13th — of course that only took two more visitors. I won’t keep updating, but here’s to many more visitors. Cheers.
Here’s one thing friends of WW&W might do to advertise the blog to Sinophones in general, and thereby perhaps to the mainland.
The “Chinese Text Project” (see our list of References & Tools” to the right) has a facility for discussion strings on each passage in the Project. Many or most of the discussions are in Chinese.
When there’s something interesting at WW&W about a passage, one could raise the topic in Chinese at CTP at the passage in question, and mention that there’s something about it over here.