Russians Developing Their Own Version To Rival 'Unreliable' Wikipedia
Russia is planning an alternate version of Wikipedia. The same has been declared in an official statement released by the country's presidential library.
The statement stated that Wikipedia does not have enough information about various regions of Russia and its lifestyle, as told by BBC. The Russian library aims to create an alternative of Wikipedia, focusing more on Russian way of living and its various regions.
In contrast to Wikipedia, which is a compilation of user generated articles where anyone can edit or add pages, the Russian alternative will be a prime online source for more than 50000 books and archive documents from around 27 regional libraries. All these books and documents will be digitalized and uploaded to be read by anyone and offered without any cost.
The report also revealed that the Russian Library dismissed Wikipedia as being unable to provide reliable and detailed information about Russian regions. The system of Wikipedia makes it more prone to personal biases where some authors attempt to impose their own views rather than sticking to facts.
Although Wikipedia has been quite a success in curbing these kind of practices and has proved to be resilient enough to rise above such conflicting thoughts, many experts still feel that the English version of the online portal, which enjoys most viewership, is a bit biased towards the West's view on sensitive issues, as elaborated in RT.
The latest project announced by Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library will be an integration of various written materials about Russia, which are available from numerous sources. The portal in still not named, but its mission is specified to objectively reflect the country, its population and the diversity of the Russian nation.
While the model of the new Russian portal will be different, it will retain the feature of Wikipedia that allows anyone with an internet connection to edit articles. However, the documents and materials will be updated by the administrator. Moreover, the information posted will only be taken from books and archive documents.
This is not the first time that the Russian government has initiated a niche for Russia in the virtual world. Newsweek told that many independent Russian developers have created alternatives to search engines, such as Yandex, and social media sites, like VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, to rival Facebook and Twitter.