The Russian government has decided to stop funding the Great Russian Encyclopedia (GRE) project. This decision has led to the shutdown of the encyclopedia, which had been serving as a significant source of academic knowledge since its creation.
According to the project’s management, government funding for the GRE ceased at the end of 2023.
Employees of the project even staged protests in Moscow, demanding their overdue wages be paid. Although the Russian government plans to cover the outstanding wages through the Reserve Fund, the materials from GRE will be moved to Ruwiki, a domestic alternative to Wikipedia.
Ruwiki, which completed its beta phase in early 2024, will now incorporate the content from GRE.
According to Kommersant, this move is expected to strengthen Ruwiki’s competitive advantage, with other Russian companies also showing interest in the GRE materials.
However, this decision has sparked controversy. Many within the GRE team and external experts have expressed their disagreement. Anastasia Lyubeznova, an editor at GRE, highlighted the differences between the two platforms.
Lyubeznova emphasized that GRE was an academic project with peer-reviewed content, indexed in the Russian Science Citation Index, and sourced from archives and museums. This contrasts with Ruwiki, which she suggests has lower standards for data verification.
Petr Lundstrem, deputy chairman of the Commission on Culture of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, has also voiced his concerns. He argues that merging GRE’s verified academic content with Ruwiki’s crowdsourced information would compromise the credibility of the GRE’s work.
Lundstrem likened this to merging Wikipedia with Britannica, which he says would be unthinkable in Western countries. He believes that this decision undermines Russia’s scientific sovereignty, warning that it could lead to a loss of credibility for both GRE and Ruwiki.
The Great Russian Encyclopedia was seen as the successor to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and was launched by a decree from President Vladimir Putin in 2002. Between 2004 and 2017, 35 volumes containing nearly 100,000 articles were published. As of December 2023, the GRE’s online portal had a monthly audience of 2.5 million people and contained 42,000 articles.
Source: Kommersant
