Update: now we have something about 2 weeks without explanations and
without fundraising in Russia.
WMF, are you still with us? :)
Linar
2014-11-16 13:36 GMT+03:00 Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>om>:
On Nov 14, 2014 10:00 PM, "rubin.happy"
<rubin.happy(a)gmail.com> wrote:
That's not the first, and even not the 10th attempt of our authorities to
create own Wikipedia, own YouTube and so on.
They will talk about it, they could even spend some budget but it's not
likely to result in something that will be sustainable and popular.
If you try something enough of times, while learning from your previous
mistakes, you will eventually succeed. That's something which state
bureaucracies know, while we didn't learn yet.
There are numerous projects existing in the wild, which cover particular
topic better than Wikipedia. The only larger encyclopedia in specific
language is the Chinese one (Baidu's one, if I remember well).
I could list a number of Wikipedia language editions, which could be easily
become irrelevant with not that much of money and decent organization.
Among them, there is at least one very large language (though, not Russian;
though, Russian authorities are capable to put much more resources into the
project).
Keep in mind that what is important to us is not important to the vast
majority of intellectual elites all over the world. Most importantly, free
license.
If Russian authorities create a framework which would reasonably cover the
issue of free accessibility, it would be practically the same for Russian
(and not just Russian) scholars willing to share their knowledge. If you
add over that a kind of stricter hierarchical approach to publishing
materials, scholars would actually prefer that encyclopedia instead of
Wikipedia.
And if that becomes a successful model, we'd lose other projects, one by
one. At some point of time it wouldn't be a matter of global politics
anymore, but our model would become obsolete.
They won't get their own movement, but we will lose our own. Except if we
realize that we are dealing *now* with the future of our existence and
start working on that as soon as possible, as better as we know.
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