ECURED Ministry of Truth

ECURED: Ministry of Truth / Regina Coyula
Posted on August 26, 2013

The esteemed Haroldo Dilla, after exploring ECURED, has written an
entertaining article where he notes some deficiencies in what tries to
present itself as a reference encyclopedia for Cubans. Although I am not
frequent user of the page, I agree with Dilla about its slowness and
other defects identified by him and Rafael Rojas.

What is alarming is that, unlike Wikipedia, ECURED is found on every
computer in the island's schools, it is the obligatory reference for
students for their classwork, and announces its access via mobile phones
and digital television. ECURED is "fed" by the workers of the Youth Club
of Computing, students at the University of Information Sciences (UCI),
and others with similar profiles who must expand it by ten articles a
month each, copied from printed sources. That is the meaning, here, of
"collaborative." Lacking rigor, lacking qualifications, quantity for
quality.

Before its imminent appearance, I could not fathom the need for a labor
of such enormous scope, even with the duplication of contents previously
published on other sites; and one can only understand ECURED as the
Ministry of Truth, like a version of the world far beyond the
"destruction of history" facing the excessive freedom of Wikipedia.

It would have been rational to create a team of Cuban collaborators to
contribute content to the global encyclopedia, to post those other
points of view that balance (or not), and to have avoided this
ill-conceived network, poorly executed and with no future, as evidenced
by the diffusion of and avidity for the portable versions of Wikipedia,
which can be accessed from multiple paths through the same computers
that offer their services privately, but not before meeting the goal of
feeding ECURED.

Regina Coyula, Havana

Translated from Penultimos Dias

26 August 2013

Source: "ECURED: Ministry of Truth / Regina Coyula | Translating Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/ecured-ministry-of-truth-regina-coyula/