Chinese government has hired some 20,000 scholars to create an online encyclopaedia that will compete with the Chinese-language variant of Wikipedia.
The advent of seeing ideas compete against one another can be a great platform for knowledge, yet we’re somehow not too sure about this idea: in a bid to render access to Wikipedia unnecessary, the Chinese government has amassed over 20,000 scholars to create its own digital encyclopaedia.
According to the South China Morning Post, the third edition of the Chinese Encyclopaedia will be “the nation’s first digital book of ‘everything,” – amounting to nearly 300,000 entries of 1,000 words each. The end goal of the project is to create an encyclopaedia that not only rivals the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, but further the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia.
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Yang Muzhi, the Editor-in-chief of the initiative, has been recorded as saying that “The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture”, adding that Wikipedia is seen to be “authoritative, accurate, and it branded itself as a ‘free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit’, which is quite bewitching… but we have the biggest, most high-quality author team in the world… our goal is not to catch up, but overtake.”
Wikipedia has suffered on-and-off bans in China for years, and has sometimes earned the ire of Chinese government for the views of its authors, or the factual evidence often contained within articles pertaining to the affairs of the country.
The third edition of the Chinese Encyclopaedia follows on the efforts of the initiative which birthed the first edition of the resource, in which the Chinese government similarly hired scientists and researchers to create.
Read: What has Wikipedia achieved in 10 years?
What are your thoughts on the Chinese government’s decision to create its own online encyclopaedia? Will this hurt or advance the goal of resources such as Wikipedia? Be sure to let us know your opinion in the comments below!
Follow Bryan Smith on Twitter: @bryansmithSA
Source: ArsTechnica
