China has employed tens of thousands of scholars to write an internet version of its national encyclopaedia, which will go online next year to compete against Wikipedia. [...] Designed to be the nation’s first digital book of “everything”, it will feature more than 300,000 entries, each about 1,000 words long, making it twice as large as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and about the same size as the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia.

According to Matthew Barzun, U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, diplomats in the digital age have a lot to learn from the story of Encarta, Microsoft’s ill-fated digital encyclopedia. In the early 2000s, Encarta briefly outsold the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica, historically the top seller in the field. But by 2009, despite being backed by the richest company in the world, Encarta had been discontinued. It was unable to compete with Jimmy Wales’ user-generated, user-audited Wikipedia, which had become and remains the predominant model for sharing knowledge.

Wikipedia is often seen as a great equalizer. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people collaborate on a seemingly endless range of topics by writing, editing and discussing articles, and uploading images and video content.

Russian is the sixth largest edition of the online encyclopedia (measured by number of content pages, excluding redirects etc), outdone only by Western European languages. In terms of traffic, Russian is now the third most accessed (measured in views per hour), only the English and Spanish sites are busier. In both cases, Russian has outpaced world languages like Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, and Portuguese. In Russia, wikipedia.org is the 9th most visited domain, and the site gets similar traffic levels from former Soviet states where Russian remains a lingua franca.

The co-founder of Wikipedia says the languages of Yoruba in West Africa and Swahili in East Africa are the most popular among the several African languages being used on the online encyclopedia..."For a long time there was this sort of cultural concern...