20,000 Chinese writers will create their own Wikipedia competitor

"The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture," said Editor-in-Chief Yang Muzhi. (credit: Wikipedia via Getty Images)

The Chinese government has hired tens of thousands of scholars to create an online version of the national encyclopedia, which will compete in size and scope with the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia.

The third edition of the Chinese Encyclopaedia will be "the nation's first digital book of 'everything,'" featuring 300,000 entries of about 1,000 words each, according to the South China Morning Post, which reported the news on Sunday. More than 20,000 authors from universities and research institutes will contribute to the effort. Ultimately, that will make the Chinese Encyclopaedia twice as large as Encyclopedia Brittanica and about the same size as the Chinese-language Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has a long history of partial and sometimes full blocks in China. Currently, the SCMP reports that most of the Chinese-language Wikipedia is available in mainland China, but searching for articles on sensitive topics, such as the Dalai Lama, will lead to a lost connection.

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