China is Building its Own Wikipedia
Source: theverge.com
Digitized Chinese Encyclopedia will include 300,000 entries compiled by 20,000 scholars
China is developing an online version of its national encyclopedia as an alternative to Wikipedia. As the South China Morning Post reports, the forthcoming third edition of the Chinese Encyclopedia will include 300,000 entries, with about 1,000 words per entry. When completed next year, it will be about the same size as the Chinese version of Wikipedia.
The third edition of the Chinese Encyclopaedia is currently China’s largest publication project, with more than 20,000 authors from universities and research institutes contributing to articles in more than 100 disciplines.
Designed to be the nation’s first digital book of “everything”, it will feature more than 300,000 entries, each about 1,000 words long, making it twice as large as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and about the same size as the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia.
“The Chinese Encyclopedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture,” Yang Muzhi, the project’s editor-in-chief and chairman of the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, said at an event last month.
Wikipedia is available in China, where many websites and media outlets are heavily censored.
CAS president Bai Chunli told the meeting that with the help of cutting-edge information technology, the encyclopaedia would present a new face to its audience. It would showcase China’s latest science and technology developments, promote historical heritage, increase cultural soft power and strengthen the core values of socialism, he said, all in line with Xi’s instructions.
Speaking at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in April, Yang said the new Chinese Encyclopedia aims to “guide and lead the public and society,” according to the South China Morning Post. More than 20,000 authors from universities and research institutions are working to compile the encyclopedia, which officials described as a digital book of “everything.” In a newspaper article last year, Yang wrote that “our goal is not to catch up, but overtake” Wikipedia with the new Chinese Encyclopedia.
Other countries have sought to censor Wikipedia or develop their own government-approved versions of the site. Authorities in Turkey blocked access to the site last week, reportedly because the site did not respond to government requests to remove content from writers accused of “supporting terror.” In 2014, Russia announced plans to build an alternative version of Wikipedia, in an attempt to provide what officials described as more “detailed and reliable” information about the country.
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