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Vladimir Putin is setting up a Russian encyclopaedia online after declaring that Wikipedia was unreliable and should be replaced.<\/span><\/p>\n The Russian president said his country would no longer welcome the crowd-sourced online encyclopaedia which began in the US.<\/span><\/p>\n The new site costing \u00a320.7million will be a web version of the Great Russian Encyclopaedia and show ‘reliable information in a good, modern way’.<\/span><\/p>\n But John Lubbock, a communications coordinator for Wikimedia, said it was unclear how Mr Putin would improve on the Russian Wikipedia.<\/span><\/p>\n He wrote on Twitter: ‘Russian Wikipedia is the seventh biggest language version of the site, with over 1.5 million articles created by 2.6 million users, all published on Open Licenses.’<\/span><\/p>\n Putin first proposed replacing Wikipedia with an electronic version of the Great Russian Encyclopaedia – the successor to the Soviet Union’s main encyclopaedia – last month.<\/span><\/p>\n According to RIA Novosti news agency, he said: ‘As for Wikipedia\u2026 it’s better to replace it with the new Big Russian Encyclopaedia in electronic form.<\/span><\/p>\n ‘At least that will be reliable information, presented in a good, modern way.’<\/span><\/p>\n In 2015, Russia briefly blocked the Russian-language version of Wikipedia for an article containing information on cannabis under legislation banning sites with drug-related material.<\/span><\/p>\n The government will now also\u00a0set up a national research and education centre for the site.<\/span><\/p>\n