Russia Clones Wikipedia, Censors It, Bans Original

Jules Roscoe reports via 404 Media: Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light. Real Russian Wikipedia editors used to refer to the real Wikipedia as Ruwiki; the new one is called Ruviki, has 'ruwiki' in its url, and has copied all Russian-language Wikipedia articles and strictly edited them to comply with Russian laws. The new articles exclude mentions of 'foreign agents,' the Russian government's designation for any person or entity which expresses opinions about the government and is supported, financially or otherwise, by an outside nation.

Wikimedia RU, the Russian-language chapter of the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, was forced to shut down in late 2023 amid political pressure due to the Ukraine war. Vladimir Medeyko, the former head of the chapter who now runs Ruviki, told Novaya Gazeta Europe in July that he believed Wikipedia had problems with 'reliability and neutrality.' Medeyko first announced the project to copy and censor the 1.9 million Russian-language Wikipedia articles in June. The goal, he said at the time, was to edit them so that the information would be 'trustworthy' as a source for all Russian users. Independent outlet Bumaga reported in August that around 110 articles about the war in Ukraine were missing in full, while others were severely edited. Ruviki also excludes articles about reports of torture in prisons and scandals of Russian government representatives.

Graphic designer Constantine Konovalov calculated the number of characters changed between Wikipedia RU and Ruviki articles on the same topics, and found that there were 205,000 changes in articles about freedom of speech; 158,000 changes in articles about human rights; 96,000 changes in articles about political prisoners; and 71,000 changes in articles about censorship in Russia. He wrote in a post on X that the censorship was 'straight out of a 1984 novel.' Interestingly, the Ruviki article about George Orwell's 1984 entirely omits the Ministry of Truth, which is the novel's main propaganda outlet concerned with governing 'truth' in the country.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.