China is bringing its own "censored" yet "in-depth" Wikipedia
What's the story
The current condition of Wikipedia in China is quite bizarre, it works fine when someone searches generic stuff, but when sensitive words like "Dalai Lama" and "Xi Jinping" come up, it just shuts down.
Credit goes to Chinese government and its stringent laws, but now to alleviate the present condition China is coming up with its own "Wikipedia".
Here's all about it.
Chinese versions
You just have to "Baidu" it for the answer
Thanks to the "Great Firewall of China" people in China don't "Google" stuff, they "Baidu" it and there is no Twitter or Facebook, instead you have Weibo and RenRen.
Subsequently you have QQ mail when you want Gmail and Nice is your go to place when you are searching for Instagram.
Wikipedia gets blocked on and off according to the whims of Chinese government.
Encyclopedia of China
State-sponsored information on everything state-related
The state-sponsored Encyclopedia of China has been around since the 1970s but in print version, a directive to digitize this resource was initiated in 2011 but didn't get much momentum until now.
Now the Chinese State Council has buckled up to hire 20,000 scholars to create the digital version of the Encyclopedia that will have 300,000 entries on 100 varied disciplines, each about 1,000-words-long.
Filter
"All in all you're just another brick in the wall"
It's needless to say that this effort is obviously going to be a heavily censored one with the government nitpicking on topics and words that it feels will be detrimental to the country's citizens.
The wall adage creeps its way in with the editor-in-chief of the project, Yang Muzhi effusively proclaiming, "The Chinese Encyclopedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture."
Battle
The war cry is - overtake Wikipedia!
Yang Muzhi is not blind towards the popularity of original Wikipedia and has pegged it as an adversary requiring "extra attention".
Yang believes, "The readers regarded it to be authoritative, accurate, and it branded itself as a 'free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit'...but we have the biggest, most high-quality author team in the world...our goal is not to catch up, but overtake."
Sex
Wikipedia, I swear it was for research
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder, recently divulged sex was the all time favourite search-topic in Wikipedia with the french and the Spaniards.
Wales glibly quipped, "This confused me at first, until it was explained to me that the French and Spanish are actually having sex, while the rest of us are just reading about it."