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November 15th, 2014 
David Schulberg 
The Russian Presidential Library wants to create “an alternative to Wikipedia,” focusing on material about life in Russia. However, the core of the project is different from what made Wikipedia one of the most visited sites in the world.
The ambitious plan to
beat Wikipedia as a prime online source for Russian reference
materials was announced by the Russian Presidential Library on
Friday. It said it has collected more than 50,000 books and
archive documents from 27 regional libraries to be digitized and
made freely available online.
“The integration of unique materials about the regions in a
single electronic encyclopedia will allow to objectively and
accurately portray the country, its population, the diversity of
state and national arrangements,” the library said in a
statement, adding that it expects the future encyclopedia to be
“one of the most visited resources in the Russian
internet.”
While the project is trumpeted to be an alternative to Wikipedia
– which the statement dismisses as being “unable to provide
reliable and detailed information about Russian regions” –
the challenger differs from the popular online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is based on the idea of user-generated articles. Anyone
can add or edit pages there, and the community of authors is
tasked with developing and enforcing the rules in order to ensure
that articles are comprehensive, accurate, and unbiased.
The mechanism is prone to conflicts like edit wars, in which
authors representing conflicting positions on an issue try to
impose their points of view. However, the online encyclopedia has
proved to be resilient enough to survive struggles in the
community.
On the other hand, different language versions of a page
describing one topic may differ, as various authors use separate
reference materials and background. Critics say the
English-language version, which has more pages and enjoys the
most visits of all the 300 variants of Wikipedia, is biased
towards the West’s view on political issues.
The project announced by the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library
will not be an alternative version of Wikipedia, but a portal
integrating articles from various encyclopedias and archive
documents from various regions of Russia.
The library is collaborating with the Russian National Library
and a library union on the task. It estimates that it can collect
some 500 major sources for its encyclopedia.
Source Article from http://rt.com/news/205731-russia-alternative-wikipedia-library/
Libraries tasked with creating ‘Russia-focused alternative to Wikipedia’
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