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EcuRed Is Cuba-Friendly Wikipedia Alternative

by Terrence O'Brien on December 14, 2010 at 01:00 PM

EcuRed
Wikipedia is a seemingly bottomless and damn-near indispensable source of information in our modern world. So, it's only natural that oppressive regimes like Cuba would seek to control the flow of information by creating their own alternative to the community-created encyclopedia. The site, called EcuRed, launched Tuesday with over 19,000 entries, a far cry from the over 3.5 million found on the English-language version of Wikipedia. The site will supposedly allow users to add and modify entries -- with prior approval from the site's administrators, of course.

As you would expect, the perspective expressed by articles on EcuRed is quite different from that found on Wikipedia. In particular, the entry on the United States paints a far less rosy picture than the Wikipedia version. The entry cites the U.S.'s history of taking "by force territory and natural resources from other nations, to put at the service of its businesses and monopolies." Of course, in a country of 11.2 million people where less than 15-percent have Internet access, the audience for EcuRed is extremely limited. But the government of Cuba realizes that in today's world what matters more than anything is information, and the battleground is clearly the Web.

Tags: censorship, cuba, ecured, government, politics, top, web, wikipedia

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