'Great Wall of culture' a great idea

We live in an era of increasingly dumbed-down global gullibility, when even the most outlandish prevarications take on a veneer of respectability when prefaced with something like "According to the latest online information..."

Think about it. It took less than a generation for us to christen the internet as the ultimate oracle of Everything We Need To Know, while reducing old-fashioned research and independent thought to Stone Age status. Our digital dependence has become so pervasive that citizens in every corner of the global village are fighting a daily battle for intellectual liberation.

China, which has around 750 million internet users, is an exception. The country plans to launch a homegrown online encyclopedia in 2018 - a platform with the potential to be a bulwark against the tidal wave of Western-oriented pap that passes for "authoritative" information on US-based Wikipedia and its Chinese version, Baidu Baike.