"Wikipedia's Days Cleated": Russia rewrites the World Encyclopedia - The Economist
Ruwiki, as the censors project is called, is mostly a copy of Wikipedia, but the most delicate moments of history have been omitted or rewritten. Kremlin ideologues hope that millions of Russians will now accept these new versions as truth. The Ruwiki project, the publication writes, cuts their way through the sensitive zones of Putin's ideology: LGBT rights, Soviet history, war in Ukraine. Russian atrocities in Bucha are rethinking as "Ukrainian and Western misinformation campaign".
Kherson, the Ukrainian city, destroyed by Russian bombs, is mentioned without a word about the war. The shooting of almost 22,000 Polish officers in Katyn in 1940 is rewritten to call into question archival documents that prove that it was done by Soviet special services. There is also no recording of a neglect chant that ridicules the Russian President "Putin X *** o!", Which was first heard in 2014.
And all references to the leader of the Russian opposition Alexei Navalny, who was killed in prison in February 2024, was changed to describe him as a simple "blogger". Analysis of the site, conducted by one of the independent Russian media agencies, shows that the vast majority of new edits are made during the working hours of weekdays. They believe that editing teams of paid authors, unlike the Wikipedia volunteer model.
The earlier versions of the Ruwiki website were discovered as much as you changed and when. At the end of 2023 it was possible to see that 158 thousand characters were removed from the original Wikipedia text in Russia. The article about "Russian Freedom of Speech" was 205,000 characters easier. The article about "censorship" in the Russian Federation was also 71 thousand characters shorter. However, as it is noted, the latest versions of the site are already hiding such statistics.
Despite its ancient differences, the Russian authorities have not yet contributed Wikipedia to the "black list" and so far these two resources are side by side. But big investments in Ruwiki indicate that "Wikipedia Days are Counted," the newspaper notes. A member of the original Russian Wikipedia team Sergey Lischyna, who left the 2015 project after attempting to censorship, says the Kremlin is considering such resources as "bricks in the Chinese wall around the truth.
" He noted that the Russian Internet is slowly cleared of foreign sites, and local search engines and artificial intelligence models will soon be forced to priority to new fake history. "The Russian Internet is not yet arranged as Chinese, but it is the direction in which we are moving and fast," he says.