Want China Times
Date: 2015-06-18
By: Staff Reporter

In the space of just two months, Hung Hsiu-chu, the deputy speaker of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, has

Wiki war! The DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen, left, and the KMT’s Hung Hsiu-chu do battle on a computer keyboard. (Illustration/China Times)

gone from being a peripheral and sometimes derided figure for the ruling Kuomintang to being the party’s probable presidential candidate with an approval rating of 46% in three opinion polls, writes our sister paper China Times.

In the four days since the primary polls confirmed Hung’s eligibility for the KMT nomination on June 14, her page on Wikipedia’s Chinese-language site has been edited over 150 times, suggesting an online battle between internet users supporting the major opposition Democratic Progressive Party candidate Tsai Ing-wen and Hung supporters online. Her page on the English version of the site has also been significantly updated and improved; only one week ago, the content on the page had largely been lifted directly from her bio on the website of the Legislative Yuan that has been a rich source of amusement for local bloggers on account of its poorly rendered English, including claims that Hung is a “royal (sic) KMT member” and that she was “accidentally elected to the Legislature.”

On the Chinese-language page, some users added details to Hung’s biography sourced from an illustration by Taiwanese cartoonist Cherng, for example hinting that Hung had slapped the cartoonist’s mother around the face when she was a pupil under Hung’s care in her previous career in education. The continual back-and-forth between pan-green netizens and Hung supporters led to the article being partially protected and flagged as controversial by the site’s admins.     [FULL  STORY]