According to the draft federal budget for 2020 and the planning period 2021-2022, the government is going to allocate about 1.7 billion rubles over three years for the creation of the "Big Russian Encyclopedia" (BRE). This resource, according to the plans, should become a national Internet portal, a quality alternative to Wikipedia.
The document specifies the amount of subsidy to the open joint-stock company Scientific Publishing House "Big Russian Encyclopedia". Thus, it is planned to allocate 684 million 466.6 thousand rubles for the creation and operation of the encyclopedic portal in 2020, 833 million 529.7 thousand rubles in 2021, and 169 million 94.3 thousand rubles in 2022.
After amendments to the budget for 2019 and the planning period of 2020-2021, in 2019 the BDT subsidy for the portal creation amounted to Br302 million 213.8 thousand. It turns out that the total amount envisaged for the project is 1 billion 989 million 304.4 thousand rubles.
The project is designed for 33 months, according to the plan, it should be ready on April 1, 2022. It was conceived by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev three years ago. Thus, in July this year, the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media developed a draft law, which is mentioned above.
Sergei Kravets, editor-in-chief of the Big Russian Encyclopedia Publishing House, believes that there is no connection with Wikipedia. According to him, the only connection is the word "encyclopedia. Nevertheless, the purpose and positioning of the projects differ.
First of all, the Russian project is the 35-volume Big Russian Encyclopedia, completed in 2017. In addition, it is a large number of industry encyclopedias, Russian Writers, Myths of the Peoples of the World, Encyclopedia of Physics, Medicine, Geography, Biology, and so on. Their total number is about 100 encyclopedias, including those created in publishing houses such as "Orthodox Encyclopedia", "Rosspen".
Information that will be added to the portal of the new resource is checked and reviewed: "The principle provides for scientific reviewing, reading by a scientific curator, passing through fact-checking services, names, dates, geographical names, bibliographic description. Classical encyclopedic training. In addition to industry-specific encyclopedias, there are also encyclopedias of national republics, such as the Tatar and Bashkir encyclopedias. There are regional, regional, and regional encyclopedias, which significantly expand the local history aspect.
Thus, the basis of the scientific and educational portal will be the encyclopedic publications verified by the scientific community. In addition, other tools will be added to the database, which give the user a quick search and semantic connection between different concepts. There are a lot of such services.
In addition, the portal is created for aggregation of information from such sources as universities and academic institutions.
"Unlike Wikipedia, we will only work with authors, reviewers who have confirmed their scientific competence in a particular field. We will try to gather a wide range of experts around the portal. That is, the portal is being created by the scientific community, which has long been interacting with encyclopedias. And this is a fundamental difference from Wikipedia, which is created by other tools that allow anonymous participation, lack of proven competence," said Sergei Kravets.
According to him, there are analogues of the project in other countries, including the English-speaking "Britannia".
The audience of the Russian portal is, first of all, those who teach or study, are engaged in self-education. The content can be adapted for both schoolchildren and students.
As for the name, there is no consensus on this. At the moment, the working name of the project is the National Scientific-Educational Encyclopedic Interactive Portal based on the Big Russian Encyclopedia.