China has hired more than 20,000 people to build the country's online version of national encyclopaedia to compete with Wikipedia.
The Chinese Wikipedia will be launched in 2018 and will feature 300,000 entries at about 1,000 words each.
The Wikipedia of China will be created by select scholars from state-run universities unlike the original Wikipedia that is openly editable by volunteers.
Currently, Wikipedia is available in China but some of its contents are blocked.
The Encyclopaedia of China is not a book but a Great Wall of culture, according to the project's editor in chief.
The Encyclopaedia of China already exists in paper form that was first published in 1993. Its second edition was released in 2012.
Last week, Turkish authorities banned access to Wikipedia in the country without giving any particular reasons.
Aiming to provide better information about the country than what was already available on the Wikipedia, Russia in 2014 announced plans for an alternative version of the online encyclopaedia.
