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... Russia's state-sponsored Wikipedia alternative seeks to prove that ignorance is strength
While Russian attempts to create a viable national alternative to Wikipedia have generally failed to gain traction, the closest thing to a success story is Ruwiki, a censored online encyclopedia that proudly complies with Russian law and is regularly cleansed of references to so-called "foreign agents", criticism of the government, and reports of torture in prisons.
"Ruwiki is a Russian organisation, and Russia has its own laws," Ruwiki director Vladimir Medeyko told Novaya Gazeta Europe in July. Medeyko was the head of Wikimedia RU, the nonprofit Wikimedia chapter formed to maintain and monitor Russian-language Wikipedia pages, until it shut down amid political pressure in late 2023.
Ruwiki's launch had been announced six months earlier, with beta testing starting a month after that. Ruwiki draws directly on the existing 1.9 million Wikipedia articles in Russian, but then automatically alters them to comply with Russian law.
Medeyko said that Ruwiki's process of adaptation begins with "deleting everything that raises even the slightest doubt" and later involves "consultation with lawyers", adding that he believed Wikipedia to have "reliability and neutrality" issues, and that these problems had only intensified since the start of the war in Ukraine. ...
