Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod (short name — Nizhny Novgorod Encyclopedia) — a regional encyclopedia about Nizhny Novgorod and the Nizhny Novgorod Region: its people, places, enterprises, events, and phenomena that matter to Nizhny Novgorod residents, regardless of whether they are known beyond the region. The first articles were written in August 2009; the project was publicly announced on April 30, 2010. The first period lasted until the late 2010s, after which the encyclopedia went without development for several years. It was relaunched in 2026 on a new engine called "Chronica."[1][2]

Subject

The encyclopedia describes the region from the inside: a street, a factory, a school museum, a local band, an urban legend. The threshold for inclusion is different here than in general-purpose encyclopedias: a subject deserves an article if it means something to residents, not to the entire country. This was articulated in the very first statement of principles — unlike Wikipedia, "there can be information and an article about any Nizhny Novgorod phenomenon, however minor."[3]

The second distinction is from a newspaper archive. A press publication lives separately, and after a few years the link to it often leads nowhere. Here, events accumulate on an object: the cable car, hospital, or street builds up a coherent chronology, where an accident, a repair, a delay, and an opening appear in sequence — with links to sources and to their saved copies.

Foundation, 2010

The editorial team of the autonomous non-profit organization "Open Nizhny Novgorod Encyclopedia" announced the launch of the project on April 30, 2010, at a discussion of the Nizhny Novgorod Press Club titled "Mass Media. Images of the Future," held aboard the Georgiy Zhukov riverboat. The founders were journalists Sergey Dresvyannikov and Petr Kuznetsov, creators of the "Nizhny Novgorod Chronicles" project, and entrepreneur Ilya Osipov, who specialized in internet technologies. At the same event, a formula was voiced that has remained the project's guiding principle: "The articles of a local wiki are meant to be of practical use." Details of the launch are covered in the article Launch of the Nizhny Novgorod Encyclopedia.[1] In December 2010, a presentation was held, after which the first mention in the press appeared — "a kind of Wikipedia analogue, Nizhny Novgorod–style."[1]

Work on filling the encyclopedia began before the announcement: the first articles are dated August 26, 2009, and 63 articles were written during 2009. By December 2010, the encyclopedia contained 1,035 articles, 4,210 pages, and 2,038 images.[2]

The first version ran on the MediaWiki engine — the same one that powers Wikipedia; articles were written and edited by readers.

Decline and dormancy, 2013–2025

The peak of content production came in 2012 — 683 new articles in a single year. The pace then fell: 272 articles in 2013, 104 in 2015, 38 in 2017. By that point the encyclopedia held 2,119 articles across 7,266 pages, along with 3,348 images, diagrams, and photographs.[2]

In July 2018, an announcement appeared on the main page: the project and website were closing, the site would remain accessible until January 1, 2019, after which the servers would be shut down — readers were asked to save any pages and images they needed.[2] The servers were never actually shut down: the site remained online and continued to be read throughout the following years. But the encyclopedia stagnated — the founders stopped working on it, and new content virtually ceased: between 2018 and 2025, only a handful of articles were added. Eight years and three months passed between the announcement of the launch and the announcement of closure, after which the project sat unchanged for another seven years.

Second version, 2026

In 2026, the encyclopedia was reopened — as a continuation of the first period, not as a new project. Texts written by readers in the 2010s have been preserved and are available in their original form: every article with a historical version displays a link to its frozen snapshot and the names of the authors who worked on it at the time. A total of 2,118 such snapshots have been preserved.

The address nnov.ec and the encyclopedia's own hosting had been in place from the very beginning and remained the same — only the engine changed: instead of MediaWiki, "Chronica" now powers the site. The original corpus remained the foundation, with new articles, sources, and sections added to it.

The "Chronica" Engine

"Chronica" is an engine for regional encyclopedias built around a chronicle of events: it is not tied to Nizhny Novgorod and can be deployed in any region with its own sources and its own feed. It works in tandem with people: the engine reads feeds, finds sources, and prepares drafts, while every ambiguous case is decided by the editorial team. The thresholds for selecting events are not universal and are calibrated to the media landscape of a specific region.

In Nizhny Novgorod, this works as follows:

  • Feed monitoring. The engine tracks 46 publications and official sources — from city portals and district newspapers to federal news agencies — selects Nizhny Novgorod events, and submits them to the city chronicle. The selection threshold is calibrated to the local media landscape: an event qualifies based on how many outlets have covered it and how deep a trace it leaves.
  • Entity tagging. People, organizations, buildings, and places are recognized in the text: a mention becomes a link to the article on the subject, or, if no article yet exists, a request to create one. Ambiguous cases — people with the same surname, incomplete names, unclear affiliations — are flagged by the engine for the editor in a list. During July and August 2026, 1,664 articles in the corpus were processed this way.
  • Object history. An event from the chronicle goes not only into its own article but also as a line item into the articles of the participants and objects involved — over the course of a year, an object builds up its own chronology.
  • Archive digitization. Scans of old periodicals are recognized page by page and converted into searchable text: by the end of August 2026, 810 pages of regional press archives had been processed.
  • Collections — curated sets where the completeness of the series matters more than any individual item. There are currently eight: "Archaeology of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet," "From the Strelka to the Yarmarka," "Hydrofoil Vessels and Ekranoplans," "GAZ Car Models," "Renamed Geographical Objects," "Deputies of the City and Region," "Nizhny Novgorod Mass Media," and "Media Faces of Nizhny Novgorod."
  • Map. Articles with coordinates become points on an interactive map of events and objects in the region.
  • English version. The engine prepares a translation of the corpus; translated articles are reviewed before publication. By early September 2026, approximately 3,400 articles were available in English.
  • Illustrations. The engine searches for images of the subject in sources and open photo archives, verifies that the image shows the correct subject, and proposes a captioned image — it is added to the article after review.

The Corpus as of 2026

As of September 3, 2026, the encyclopedia contains approximately 3,900 articles, 436 categories, and more than 7,400 links to sources. The English version comprises approximately 3,400 translated articles; the historical layer holds 2,118 frozen snapshots of articles from the first version.

Web Archive of Sources

Links on the internet die: a publication shuts down, a site moves, a page disappears — and a statement that relied on that publication is left without support. Every page linked to by an article is automatically sent to the web archive and remains accessible there even if the original site disappears. The articles in the corpus currently contain more than 13,000 links to archived copies — more than two copies per footnote.

A web archive is a library that captures and stores copies of internet pages so they can be read years after the original has changed or disappeared. The largest is the Internet Archive: it began saving the web in 1996, and public access to the collection via the Wayback Machine opened around 2001; the organization is based in San Francisco.[4]

Internet archiving is an established international practice: national and university libraries and archives maintain their own web archives, and since July 2003 they have been united in the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), founded at the National Library of France by twelve organizations; today it includes participants from more than 35 countries.[5] The format of an archived copy is standardized: WARC is described by the international standard ISO 28500, meaning a copy can be read by any party, not only its owner.[6]

A separate focus is sites that no longer exist. The Nizhny Novgorod internet of the 1990s and 2000s has almost entirely disappeared; the engine searches web archives for whatever remains of it and reconstructs the history of each site from those traces. This is how the collection "Archaeology of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet" was assembled.

Principles

  • A Nizhny Novgorod subject. The encyclopedia writes about the region and about the wider world only insofar as it concerns the region.
  • Usefulness over academicism. Plain, living language is appropriate when it helps convey the point.[3]
  • Different points of view, especially well-argued ones, are the norm, not the exception.[3]
  • A link to a source and its copy. Every statement has an origin, and it must remain verifiable twenty years from now.

Legal Status of Materials

The legal status of materials is indicated in the footer of every page: "© 2009, 2026 'Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod.' All rights reserved. Quotation permitted with a reference to the original." The first date is the year the first articles were written; the second is the year of the relaunch.

See also

Archived Versions

The pages from which this article is composed have been preserved as frozen snapshots: their text does not change and remains accessible at a permanent address, together with the date of the last edit and the names of the authors.

  • The encyclopedia's main page and the closure announcement, July 2018[2]
  • Address: the encyclopedia's principles in brief, 2010[3]
  • Community: project participants, 2010[7]
  • Identity: who does this and why, 2010[8]
  • Authority: a guide for authors and editors, 2010[9]
  • FAQ: frequently asked questions about the encyclopedia, 2010[10]
  • City wiki: on the genre of local encyclopedias, 2011[11]
  • Encyclopedia partnership programs, 2012[12]
  • Correct Article: how an encyclopedia article is structured, 2015[13]
  • ENN Glossary, 2015[14]
  • ENN Glossary, letter "G"[15]
  • ENN Glossary, letter "L"[16]
  • ENN Glossary, letter "U"[17]
  • ENN Glossary, letter "S"[18]

Sources

  1. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod — Opening of the Nizhny Novgorod Encyclopedia: press release, April 30, 2010
  2. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — Main page and project closure announcement, July 2018
  3. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — Address: the encyclopedia's principles in brief, 2010
  4. help.archive.org — Internet Archive — Wayback Machine: general information
  5. netpreserve.org — International Internet Preservation Consortium — About us: the consortium was founded in July 2003 at the National Library of France
  6. iipc.github.io — The WARC Format 1.1 (international standard ISO 28500)
  7. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — Community: project participants, 2010
  8. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — Identity: who does this and why, 2010
  9. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — Authority: a guide for authors and editors, 2010
  10. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — FAQ: frequently asked questions about the encyclopedia, 2010
  11. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — City wiki: on the genre of local encyclopedias, 2011
  12. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — Encyclopedia partnership programs, 2012
  13. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — Correct Article: how an encyclopedia article is structured, 2015
  14. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — ENN Glossary, 2015
  15. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — ENN Glossary, letter "G," 2015
  16. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — ENN Glossary, letter "L," 2015
  17. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — ENN Glossary, letter "U," 2015
  18. — Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod, archived version — ENN Glossary, letter "S," 2015