Russia Clones Wikipedia, Censors It, Bans Original

Graphic designer Constantine Konovalov calculated the number of characters changed between Wikipedia RU and Ruviki articles on the same topics, and found that there were 205,000 changes in articles about freedom of speech; 158,000 changes in articles about human rights; 96,000 changes in articles about political prisoners; and 71,000 changes in articles about censorship in Russia. He wrote in a post on X that the censorship was “straight out of a 1984 novel.”

Interestingly, the Ruviki article about George Orwell’s 1984 entirely omits the Ministry of Truth, which is the novel’s main propaganda outlet concerned with governing “truth” in the country.

That last detail...wow. They really don't want to leave any doubt about what they're doing, do they?

Doesn't seem to be banned by my ISP.

Anyway, Russian Wikipedia clones to steal budget money are old news.

There even is such a meme as "encyclong", that's what the Wikipedia article for vikings turned into after one such cloning with replacing wiki- (no difference between V and W in Russian) with encyclo- .

Huh? Wikipedia isn't banned in Russia yet. Though I do expect them to take steps towards it.

Cool, so less Wikipedia vandalism for the rest of us!

Let's clone Russia, censor it and ban original

Give it 5 years and I bet Florida does the same.

Kinda reminds me of the American Conservative vanity project

https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page

by the failson of the notorious 1970s political harpy Phyllis Schlafly.

Of course, all you need to do is run a differential between Wikipedia and this thing to find exactly what the government is trying to censor. Idiots.

I mean, this might work today, but as soon as people start making edits on both versions it will be a nightmare to update the copy. They're going to have to merge different edits on the same article. I don't want to be anywhere near that merge conflict.

Wikipedia is not currently banned in Russia.

But the Russian branch of Wikimedia as an organization is.

Also, pretty much nobody in Russia uses Ruwiki, everyone keeps using Wikipedia.

That's all not to say it isn't a troubling development, though. But Russians are more likely to access Wikipedia through VPN than to rely on Ruwiki. The game's not lost.

Edit: Thank you OP for striving for the best accuracy!

Tbh I’m most surprised by OP’s surprise. Russia doing weird, censorious shit like this is just another Tuesday.

So Putin's regime embraced, extended and extinguished it? How ironic...

Must be nice, in China we only have the poorly formatted, lack-of-citation garbage that is Baidu Baike https://baike.baidu.com/ .

The "sorting algorithm" article: https://baike.baidu.com/item/排序算法/5399605 only have 3 citations: none of which are the original papers and none of which have any links. I tried searching these "citations" and found absolutely nothing...

Similarly, the article for "Amsterdam" contains almost no citation beyond the first paragraph https://baike.baidu.com/item/阿姆斯特丹/814

Just imagine how bad it would be for more obscure concepts.

From the top of the page:

Ruviki 2.0 is in beta | Report bugs

Trying to pass this clone off as an "update" to actual Wikipedia lol

The Ruzzian Federation is lies all the way down.

MAGATs are dreaming to copy Vlad's Russia.

lmao what a fucker

So, now they are slowly (or immediately and forever, I don't know the time span) injecting propaganda into their clone of wikipedia and they are simultaneously thus admitting they are doing it. (to further brainwash the russian citizens)

So lettme repeat: FUCK PUTIN, and stuff your rubber clones in your ass. (which there are many of)

Humans are stupid. We should just start over.

Russia wants to ban Wikipedia - the US wants to ban TikTok.

Something tells me the mass-surveillance toy they hoped the internet would turn into isn't working out the way they had hoped.

What the hell?

The only surprise in this news is that the "more like this" sidebar is filled with porn for some reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2024-04-25/In_the_media Wikipedia's own coverage, released 4 days ago. The repetition of the Orwellian detail makes me think both were inspired by Novaya Gazeta's coverage from the 11th.

Dickipedia.

Back in my day it was just boob edits.

While wikipedia is decent at giving overviews on some scientific and technical topics, but when there is a topic about something that is historical and/or any way politically or monetarily relevant there will be an edit war to change it to suit one interest groups wishes or anothers. It really is a cesspool of psyops, misinformation and articles to be basically corporate PR at certain topics, and that is just because google usually gives wikipedia articles as first or second result on any given subject and it's a really cost effective way to propagandize people and doing it is really low cost. Now Russia just monopolizes the propaganda inside their own borders.

The gaslighting is crazy

That sounds like something Russia would do.

Is it banned now or what?

Not hell, ol Russia.

don't worry, the terrorists will get there first

It's really getting kind of ridiculous at this point. You can't hide truth, and you can hide from truth. All things being equal, truth has a way of being ultimately seen.

_{CC BY-NC-SA 4.0}

The reliability of Wikipedia depends on the topic.

Not like the original one is unbiased anyway.

So like China. Man, what is up with communist states and censoring stuff?

Is it actually banned now? Seriously? I'm not surprised, I wish those terrorists can only access their own, isolated internet