Verified information was hard to come by when a group of armed mercenaries took control of a Russian provincial capital and started moving towards Moscow in late June. The Wagner Group’s rebellion was initially largely ignored by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda apparatus, but soon after that, the country’s largest internet service providers were forced to block access to Google News, and the Russian search engine Yandex quickly hid results for certain queries, including those for the rebels’ leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. One exception was the crowdsourced encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which published a thorough article about the revolt in Russian and updated it as new information came in. The essay, titled “The Mutiny of the Wagner Group,” was thousands of words lengthy and quoted sources from US publications to Russian official media, as well as news organisations the Kremlin deems “foreign agents” for not toeing the party line. On its first day, it received more than 270,000 page views.
One of the most popular websites in Russia is Wikipedia, which receives approximately 95 million visitors a month and has about 10,000 active editors
One of the most popular websites in Russia is Wikipedia, which receives approximately 95 million visitors a month and has about 10,000 active editors who keep its nearly 2 million entries in Russian up to date. Given the Kremlin’s persistent attempts to control what is said about the government and its policies, a trend that has only intensified since the invasion of Ukraine, its persistence in Putin’s Russia seems a little surprising. New legislation against purported “disinformation” and bans of news websites, civic organisations, and even environmental groups have been brought about by wartime censorship.
Although Wikipedia has continued to operate in Russia, there are indications that the tide may be turning against it. According to the Wikimedia Foundation Inc., a San Francisco-based organisation that hosts the servers that run Russian Wikipedia and is therefore legally responsible for what is published, the government repeatedly fined the website from March 2022 through this June, totalling nearly 23 billion rubles ($255 million).
In court, the foundation is fighting the fines because, according to Jacob Rogers, it would not have complied with any of the government’s orders to remove content. “We think that Wikipedia is full of pretty good information overall, that it’s got good reliable sources representing a variety of different perspectives on these issues, that the users are doing a good job of making it be written from a neutral point of view,” he says.
Putin has long made his displeasure with Wikipedia, vowing in 2019 to support an alternative that “will be reliable information, presented in a good, modern way.” This April, Valery Fadeyev, the chairman of the Human Rights Council, a Kremlin-backed mouthpiece on civil society issues, said Wikipedia’s coverage of Ukraine justified replacing it with a more cooperative local alternative. The same month Maksut Shadayev, Russia’s minister of digital development, told journalists that the government had no plans to do so, but hardly offered the encyclopedia a vote of confidence. “We are not blocking Wikipedia yet,” he said, according to the Interfax news agency. “There are no such plans for now.”
What is Ruwiki, the Russian alternative to Wikipedia?
On June 27, a nearly exact replica of the Russian Wikipedia went online, which many people took as a warning. (Under some circumstances, users may “fork” Wikipedia, copying a version and starting an alternative version from that snapshot.) The article regarding alleged human rights violations in Bucha at the outset of the war was one of many on subjects that Russia has prohibited. The Wagner Group was covered in a piece, but the mutiny was left out. An item on a vulgar cry used frequently by Ukrainian football fans against Putin was also removed.
The name of the new website, Ruwiki, is a popular abbreviation for Russian Wikipedia. Vladimir Medeyko, the long-time administrator of the Russian Wikipedia editors, is the author. His coworkers were astounded that he had abandoned a project he had been working on since 2003, and they were even more surprised to learn that his motivation for leaving was to found a Kremlin-friendly competition.
According to Medeyko, he is not employed by the government. He claims he spent more than a decade trying to change Wikipedia from within before the separation, which was made possible after he discovered like-minded investors who he declined to name. The new website uses crowdsourcing less like Wikipedia’s free for all. Although Medeyko’s strategy calls for allowing such volunteer contributions on the majority of articles while also having committees of experts review the content, Ruwiki is now completely inaccessible to outside editors. Experts don’t want to participate in Wikipedia because, according to him, they don’t want to argue with uneducated individuals who are entitled to the same rights.
Ruwiki will follow Russian laws while maintaining its neutrality, according to Medeyko. “There will be particularly strict requirements for the quality of sources and indisputable phrasing regarding current events,” he says. Its article about the invasion of Ukraine never refers to it as an invasion, simply noting that “Military operations in Ukraine began on February 24, 2022. This was preceded by a crisis in relations between Russia and Ukraine.”
While Medeyko says he opposes blocking Wikipedia, some hard-liners within the government see his project as a way to do just that. Alexander Khinshtein, the chair of the digital committee in the lower house of the Russian parliament, wrote on his Telegram account the day after Ruwiki went live: “As I’ve said many times, Wikipedia can only be completely blocked when a domestic analogue has been created. Now, that’s no longer an issue.”
Russian Wikipedians fear a similar outcome. “If they want to block us, they can,” says Stanislav Kozlovskiy, who’s replaced Medeyko. He says the Putin regime has targeted fewer than 200 articles-a tiny fraction. He also says it’s hard to satisfy government censors entirely. “We try to maintain neutrality, and any sensitive issues are reviewed by moderators,” he says. “We limit the use of Russian or Ukrainian sources for current events, but that doesn’t stop the criticism. In Russia, officials think our articles are written by Ukrainians, while some Ukrainians seem to believe that they’re written in the Kremlin.”
Wikipedia has run into problems with local authorities in more than just Russia. Because of its backing for terrorist groups in Syria, Turkey declared the website to be a state sponsor of terrorism and shut it down for more than two years. The claims, according to the Turkish government, are part of a smear campaign that jeopardises both national security and public order. In 2020, a Turkish court reinstated Wikipedia after ruling that the ban had breached the nation’s constitutional provision of the right to free speech.
Wikipedia was taken down by Pakistan for a weekend in February after it published what it deemed to be sacrilegious material. In May, India warned the foundation that if it didn’t adhere to a law stating that all maps must match its national border outline, including disputed territories like Kashmir, it would block the English version of Wikipedia locally. The neighbourhood is considering whether or not to comply.
The popularity of Wikipedia is one of its strongest weapons against such attacks. When China, the only major nation to officially forbid Wikipedia, started to block the website, it first fostered a government-friendly substitute: the collaborative encyclopaedia Baidu Baike. This lessened the damage. The new site allowed registered users to create their own content but was also careful to follow China’s censorship rules, giving users a service with a similar feel that posed less of a threat to the government.
Additionally, Medeyko intends to imitate elements of Wikipedia’s crowdsourcing methodology. He has stated that Ruwiki will look for editors who don’t find Wikipedia welcoming for various reasons, including political concerns. He is now viewed as a heretic by his old community as a result of creating the website. When Medeyko revealed his ambitions, the other editors of Wikipedia promptly removed his account, which had been used to make more than 25,000 revisions and hundreds of new pages.
However, if Ruwiki does replace Wikipedia in Russia, the original site’s editors will need to choose how they feel about it and how to interact with it. Nikolay Bulykin, a regular contributor to the Russian Wikipedia who uploads drone-captured images of old churches and castles, shrugs his shoulders at the idea that the hundreds of hours he’s spent writing for Wikipedia would end up on a site that might replace it. “I’m not going to forbid anyone from using my work,” he says from Kazakhstan, where he relocated after the Russian army began drafting men to fight in Ukraine. “That’s not what free knowledge is all about.”