Slashdot Mirror
China is Recruiting 20,000 People To Write Its Own Wikipedia (vice.com)
The Chinese government is recruiting 20,000 people to create an online encyclopedia that will be the country's own, China-centric version of Wikipedia, or as one official put it, like "a Great Wall of culture." From a report: Known as the "Chinese Encyclopedia," the country's national encyclopedia will go online for the first time in 2018, and the government has employed tens of thousands of scholars from universities and research institutes who will contribute articles in more than 100 disciplines. The end result will be a knowledge base with more than 300,000 entries, each of which will be about 1,000 words long. "The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture," Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project and the chairman of the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, said. He added that China was under pressure from the international community to produce an encyclopedia that will "guide and lead the public and society."
I for one am very excited to read their pages on Tibet and Falun Gong.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
NO. They will not have to write their own.
Most articles are not controversial at all, and they will just sync them with Wikipedia. They can even do a real time sync, so that when Chinese editors update their version the updates go straight to Wikipedia.
The controversial articles will be home grown. But that is only a small fraction of the total.
That is the Archillies heal of Wikipedia. It can be selectively and repeatably forked. I see Russian and Turkish versions very soon.
He who controls the past controls the future...