Wikipedia’s days may be numbered in Russia, as Moscow’s long-standing bid to replace the online encyclopaedia comes to fruition.
A “new version of history is taking shape”, on RuWiki, said The Economist, as an expert said that Russia’s internet is starting to resemble the heavily censored and closely controlled version in China, where Wikipedia is blocked.
‘Heavy hacks’
RuWiki is “mostly a straightforward copy” of Wikipedia, but the “most sensitive moments of history” have been “left out or rewritten”. It “might be called Orwellian”, if only the author “were not himself occasionally censored”. The rewriters “hack their way through the sensitive zones of Putinist ideology”, producing mangled rewrites on topics including “LGBT rights, oral sex” and “Soviet history”.
Russian “atrocities” in Bucha, near Kyiv, in 2022 are “reimagined” as a “Ukrainian and Western disinformation campaign” and the execution of nearly 22,000 Polish officers in 1940 is rewritten to “cast doubt on the archive documents proving it was done by Soviet secret services”.
RuWiki takes a “different direction” from its inspiration, said PC Gamer, portraying a world where the late Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin “just happened to explode in mid-air”. The article on the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal “goes to great lengths” to “express Russia’s official stance” on the episode.
According to an analysis of the site by an independent Russian media outfit, the vast majority of the new edits are being made during weekday working hours, which might suggest teams of paid writers are performing the edits, rather than the Wikipedia model of volunteer editors.
Wikipedia has “faced trouble” from the Kremlin since the start of the Ukrainian war in 2014 , said The Economist, and is now one of the few surviving independent sources of information in Russia.
Following a state crackdown on online news media after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin gave his approval to new alternative platforms. Things stepped up a gear last year, when “glitzy ads” for RuWiki appeared across Moscow, said The Economist.
“Heavy investment” in the project suggests that Wikipedia’s “days are numbered”. So, although the Russian internet “isn’t yet built like the Chinese one”, said Sergei Leschina, a former member of the Russian Wikipedia team, “it’s the direction we are heading, and quickly”.
Global censorship
Since 2015, Wikipedia has been banned in China and in its place is Baidu Baike, a Chinese-language internet encyclopaedia. Unlike Wikipedia, it complies with the Chinese Communist Party’s demands for censorship – “so it’s easy to see why it’s the government’s preferred (and homegrown) option”, said The Independent.
There has also been censorship of Wikipedia by governments in other countries including Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Venezuela.
In another example of information censorship, Hamichlol, meaning “the entirety”, is an online encyclopaedia for Haredi Jews, which mainly censors any mention of homosexuality, content that contradicts a creationist world view, and behaviours deemed immodest.