A state-sponsored online encyclopedia, essentially a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia, has been completely rewritten to exclude any information or theories that might reflect poorly on the government. This is the Wikipedia of the Putin era. Russia has its own version of the world’s largest and most consulted online encyclopedia, called Ruwiki. This version is a translated and enhanced adaptation of the original, following the same strict editorial guidelines as in other countries. The state-sponsored version, known as Ruviki, drops the ‘w’ but incorporates “ruwiki” in its URL and replicates all entries from the Russian Wikipedia, carefully modified to comply with Russian laws. The new articles exclude mentions of “foreign agents,” the government’s term for any person or entity that expresses opinions about the government and receives support, financially or otherwise, from a foreign country.
Wikimedia RU, the Russian-language chapter of the non-profit organization that manages Wikipedia, was forced to shut down at the end of 2023 due to political pressures related to the war in Ukraine. Vladimir Medeyko, the former head of the chapter who now leads Ruviki, told Novaya Gazeta Europe in July that he believed Wikipedia had problems with “reliability and neutrality.”
Medeyko first announced the project to copy and censor the 1.9 million articles of the Russian Wikipedia in June. The aim, he stated, was to edit them so that the information would be “reliable” for all Russian users. The independent agency Bumaga reported in August that about 110 articles on the war in Ukraine were completely missing, while others were heavily altered. Ruviki also omits articles on allegations of torture in prisons and scandals involving Russian government officials.
Graphic designer Constantine Konovalov analyzed the number of character changes between articles on Wikipedia RU and Ruviki on the same topics. He found that there were 205,000 changes in articles on freedom of speech, 158,000 modifications in articles on human rights, 96,000 changes in articles on political prisoners, and 71,000 changes in articles on censorship in Russia. In a post on X, he wrote that the censorship was “straight out of a novel from 1984.” Notably, the Ruviki article on George Orwell’s 1984 entirely omits the Ministry of Truth, the main propaganda body in the novel responsible for controlling the “truth” in the country.
