russia launches its own analog of Wikipedia for censorship

russia has launched a pro-government analog of the global online encyclopedia Wikipedia called Ruwiki.

The site is curated by Vladimir Medeyko, the longtime leader of Wikipedia editors in russia, who has been indefinitely blocked from writing on the original online encyclopedia. He launched the pro-Putin Ruwiki and copied 1.9 million russian articles from Wikipedia to its russian counterpart.

In Ruwiki’s article on Ukraine, there is no mention of the russian-Ukrainian war.

In a comment to Bloomberg, Medeyko said that Ruwiki will have “particularly strict requirements for the quality of sources and indisputable phrasing regarding current events.”

In May, Medeyko said that russia’s war in Ukraine was putting “unprecedented pressure” on Wikipedia’s open source editing model, adding: “In my view, the Wikipedia mechanisms are not coping well with this pressure.”

As a reminder, russia announced its intention to create its own alternative to Wikipedia in May 2022.

Earlier that year, Roskomnadzor (russian federal executive agency responsible for monitoring, controlling and censoring russian mass media) sent a demand to the administration of the russian-language Wikipedia to erase truthful information about russia’s war against Ukraine, and later took “enforcement action” against the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, for allegedly violating laws in connection with articles about the russian-Ukrainian war.

Source: The Telegraph

Photo: SOTA