In November 2019, President of Russia Vladimir Putin called for the establishment of a portal that would contain reliable information verified by experts from the Russian Academy of Sciences and offered to users in a modern form.
The mission of the project, already called a continuation of the Great Russian Encyclopedia, will be to create a single space and information adapted to user requests, as well as to unite authors, editors and reviewers into an expert community. The created working group, in addition to academicians of the RAS, included representatives of the education and culture ministries.
Sergey Kravets, one of the editors of the Great Russian Encyclopedia, which 36 volumes were published from 2004 to 2017, said that prior to the new project start date, its creators studied the successful experience of not only Wikipedia, but also many other known encyclopedias well adapted to the digital age.
Ultimately, experts came to the conclusion that no more than 25 percent of articles can be saved without serious updating. Moreover, these are articles written by prominent authors on classic topics.
The main unit of the new portal will be a slot, a complex of different level materials, built around an encyclopedic concept. Its mandatory elements will be the author’s article, illustrations, verified references and bibliography. The version, which will be operational in a year and a half, will contain 120 thousand of these slots.
By 2025, taking into account the constant growth in the amount of knowledge accumulated by people, the portal creators plan to increase these to 170 thousand.
Kravets told that four types of slots will be created.
The first, basic, is the main encyclopedic article and the tools around it. At the same time, even in the basic article, a point of view that differs from the author’s will be fixed and personalized.
The second, a “sectoral” type, is additional information, for example, material from a scientific journal that clarifies data or contains an alternative view. That is, users will have access to full-text databases of scientific publications, for which “Knowledge” is integrated with the resources of the National Electronic Library.
The third slot type is exploratory, where there will be a special space for open discussions.
The fourth type will contain expert chats.
Users will be able to read everything, but in order to participate in the discussions, they will have to be verified in the expert status, which can be obtained after passing an additional selection. The portal will have a community of specialists, consisting of at least ten thousand experts in various fields.
To date, a scientific and editorial board has been formed, including 200 leading scientists, whose authority is capable of attracting many talented young specialists from all over the world to this work. The portal will also have its own council, the main objective of which will be to unite museums, archives, libraries, theaters and research institutions around the project.
The successful functioning of “Knowledge”, according to the portal developers, requires, first of all, the enthusiasm of people from different countries of the world, because specialists must understand that their knowledge and developments bring real benefits to people.