Sogou Science Encyclopedia

» see baike.sogou.com/kexue as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 11 November 2022 a Chinese encyclopedia deleted itself on schedule. Sogou Science Encyclopedia had posted a notice three weeks earlier: operations would stop on that date, and every entry on the platform would be erased along with the servers holding them. Nothing would be retrievable afterward. The notice was accurate.

It had launched in October 2020 as a product separate from Sogou Baike, the company's general encyclopedia, which is still running today. The science version was the ambitious one. Entries were to be written by working researchers and vetted through peer review by users who held doctorates, with the whole organization deliberately decentralized. Sogou talked about the site becoming somewhere academics would actually talk to each other.

The timing is the part worth keeping. Tencent bid $2.1 billion for Sogou in late July 2020, about three months before this launched. The deal closed in 2021. The encyclopedia died roughly a year after that, in a season when the Chinese tech press was running headlines that opened with the words "another Sogou business shuts down."

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the promise ~

Peer review is an odd thing to bolt onto a wiki. Wikipedia's answer to accuracy is volume and revision history, where you fix errors by having enough people look at them. Sogou's answer was credentials at the door, with doctorate holders as the review layer. That is a defensible design. It is also a design that cannot outlive its sponsor's interest, because the reviewers are the product and they work for free on the strength of the platform's standing.

The content carried a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, printed at the foot of every page. Legally, anyone was free to take a complete copy and publish it somewhere else.

~ the delete ~

The announcement appeared on the site around 23 October 2022 and was picked up that same week by ifeng and the financial wires, all of them reporting the same two things: the date, and that the deletion would be total.

What survives is one Internet Archive capture of the front page from 10 November 2022, the day before. There is no dump. Two years of entries written by people with doctorates, under a license built specifically to let work outlive its host, went off a Tencent server and stayed gone. Sogou Baike, the ordinary one, answers 200 today with a working encyclopedia behind it.

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