China to get its own version of Wikipedia in 2018

China is planning to launch its own official version of its online encyclopaedia Wikipedia by next year. However, unlike the openly editable Wikipedia, the Chinese version will be created by selective scholars from stat-run universities and institutions.

Liu Guohui, deputy editor of the publication, said that more than 20,000 scholars had been hired for the project, which will include 300,000 entries, each about 1,000 words long with 103 disciplines in 2018.

Wikipedia is available in China, but some of its content is blocked in the country. As a result, China’s netizens have limited options to look for reference information on various topics.

The national encyclopaedia of China already exits in paper form, with two editions published in 1993 and 2009. But it is yet unclear how factual it is as many critics point the government-funded works has omitted or distorted some entries for political purposes. In 2011, China’s State Council, the country’s cabinet, approved the online project, but work on it began only recently.

China has felt pressure to “catch up” with other national encyclopaedia to guide the “public and society.” But the online encyclopaedia of China will be “a Great Wall of Culture,” Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project, who chairs the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, said in April.