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Russia needs own alternative to Wikipedia

Russian-language edition of Wikipedia receives about one million queries per hour

ST. PETERSBURG, April 04. /ITAR-TASS/. Anton Likhomanov, the director general of the National Library of Russia, the oldest public library in the country, has suggested creating an information and reference web resource in Russia that can serve as an alternative to Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia’s Russian-language edition receives about one million queries per hour, but the resource contains a great number of mistakes, which can hardly be corrected,” Likhomanov told a pedagogical forum on Friday.

He recalled that Wikipedia was controlled from the United States and at any moment Russian people could face the same situation as with international payment systems Visa and MasterCard, which had stopped serving clients of several Russian lenders due to US sanctions.

Likhomanov noted that there had been attempts to create an alternative web resource in the past. However, they had not been brought to fruition. Today, “it is high time” for that, he said.