The Russian government has denied plans to replace the "Wikipedia"
The new encyclopedic portal, which is planned to be created on the basis of the digital version of the Great Russian Encyclopedia, will not be a replacement, nor a competitor to Wikipedia. This statement was made by the government of the Russian Federation, according to Interfax .
Sergey Prikhodko, head of the government office of the Russian Federation and the working group on this issue, reacted harshly to the media replication of the idea of closing Wikipedia and replacing it with the National Encyclopedic Portal:
Anticipating the most popular question of the past week, I want to immediately put an end to the “i”. There are no intentions to prohibit, replace or oppose Wikipedia from the government working group and there will not be.
Recall that at the end of August, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree according to which a working group was formed to create a national academic portal, and the heir to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, BDT, was taken for the content basis.
According to Prikhodko, the main goal of the working group is to ensure the creation of a “reliable source of knowledge”. The strength of the future portal is the attraction of other publications to the BDT, from thematically the widest to the most specialized. For example, the portal will be accessible academic information from the "Encyclopedia of Discrete Mathematics" or "Encyclopedia of Plasma."
The target audience of the portal is seen in students, schoolchildren and other people interested in finding information of various levels of complexity. The vice-premier cites as an example the specialty “Britannica” - the oldest English-speaking universal encyclopedia, the main readers of which are pupils.
“This will be a multi-level base of reliable knowledge available to people with different educational and research needs,” says Prikhodko.
Based on the words of the vice-premier, the project being developed will be aimed at an educational niche that Wikipedia is not always able to close, especially when the question concerns highly specialized information.