Why the National Encyclopedic Portal has no chance against Wikipedia

Recently, the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree according to which a competitor should be created for the Russian-speaking segment of the free Internet encyclopedia "Wikipedia". The basis for the planned national encyclopedic portal will be taken electronic version of BDT - the Great Russian Encyclopedia, which, in turn, is the heir of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

The Prime Minister noted that the new project should not yield to the speed of updating Wikipedia information and be competitive.
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This is not the first government initiative in trying to create competitive global digital projects. We have already seen Sputnik, we are currently developing a messenger for government officials and Russian business, and now we are trying to create an alternative to Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, to create such a vast resource, one decree is not enough.

Stanislav Kozlovsky, Executive Director of NP Wikimedia.Ru, in an interview with the Izvestia newspaper, was skeptical about the chances of a national encyclopedic portal to surpass Wikipedia.

According to the figures given by Kozlovsky, today 1338 thousand articles are posted in the Russian-language segment of “Wikipedia”, whereas in the electronic version of BDT - only 45 thousand (up to the end of 2016), and their total number is planned to be doubled, that is, to 90 thousand.

Plus, a narrow circle of specialists is engaged in filling BDT, while Wikipedia is filled collectively and every fact and formulation is subject to free discussion. Given the multitude of opinions, Wikipedia strives to present the facts objectively and unbiasedly, whereas in the case of BDT, everything depends on the preferences of the author of an article.

Another point noted by Kozlovsky is copyright. All information on Wikipedia is under a public license, that is, it can be freely copied and used for non-commercial purposes. In the case of BDT, the copyright is valid and it is not known whether the information contained in it will be released to “free floating” on the Internet.

So far, as far as I know, even this was not the case. But if this happened, and the contents of the new national encyclopedia would not be in the public domain, but in the public domain, a free license would be applied, that would be great. This would be a big step forward for the entire Russian people. But I doubt that this is possible.

In turn, the CNews portal received comments from Alexander Wisly, who noted that the National Encyclopedic Portal is planned not as an analogue of Wikipedia, but as a competitor. “Readers will have an alternative, they will decide who they believe more,” he says.

Currently, only 200 people work on BDT (as opposed to 600 in the Soviet period), and about 2 million Russian-speaking users around the world make edits to Wikipedia.

On behalf of the government, a working group of 21 people will be formed to work on the Wikipedia analogue, which will include high-ranking representatives of the government apparatus, the Ministry of Communications, the Ministry of Culture and others.

One of the arguments for creating an analogue of “Wikipedia” is that the latter contains many errors and inaccuracies, while BDT will provide the Runet users with clear and reliable information.

However, a number of factors will hinder the “analogue” of the electronic version of BDT:

• the inability of 200 people to quickly fill;
• the inability to cover all available areas of knowledge and nuances covered in the "Wikipedia";
• doubtful efficiency in writing articles on recent events;
• high costs.

Regarding the latter fact, Kozlovsky spoke separately:

In principle, "Wikipedia" is published almost without money, due to the enthusiasm and small donations. With this money, conferences, contests, expeditions are held. The budget of the Russian part of Wikipedia this year is 2 million rubles. As for classical encyclopedias, I know that in 2014 a group of scientists wrote a letter to the editorial board of the Great Russian Encyclopedia and asked for the creation of its electronic version 670 million rubles.

Given that the creators of the National Encyclopedic Portal will need to increase significantly the activity of the authors in terms of filling with content, the project may become too heavy for the state. Wikipedia is worthless to the treasury, and at the same time, for many years of work, it is ahead of other classical encyclopedias around the world in terms of filling BDT, not inferior to them in quality of articles on key issues, and in terms of the details of coverage and coverage of topics - ahead of order