On Nov 14, 2014 10:00 PM, "rubin.happy" rubin.happy@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.