Column of the director of “Wikimedia RU” Stanislav Kozlovsky about the consequences of blocking “Wikipedia”

Although the blocking of Wikipedia in Russia has been discussed since 2012, the risk of this has increased many times over recently. By the beginning of 2022, there were six Wikipedia articles in the registers of Roskomnadzor, now there are already 140 of them. And although this is only 0.007%, the fact was so inflated that a number of officials began to demand that Wikipedia be blocked.

Now the Wikipedia section in Russian contains 1.93 million articles and is extremely popular – it is visited more than 1.1 billion times a month from 96 million devices. The Russian-language “Wikipedia” is the most widely read encyclopedia not only in the Russian Federation, but also in ten other countries in the post-Soviet space.

Within a month, it is edited, updated and supplemented by 10-12 thousand people, about 600 thousand changes are made to almost 250 thousand articles, and 6-7 thousand new ones appear. Most of the authors (about three quarters) are from Russia and Belarus, the rest are from Ukraine (5.2%), Germany (1.3%), Israel (1%), the USA (0.7%) and other countries.

If blocking does occur, what will be the consequences? As the experience of blocking the Turkish Wikipedia (2017-2019) shows, the number of visits, although it decreased by 2.5 times, remained at a very high level in absolute numbers. When the lockdown was lifted, attendance recovered almost immediately. In Russia, where blocking has been in place for 11 years, a much larger percentage of Internet users know how to bypass them. In this regard, it can be assumed that the blocking of Wikipedia will be even less effective.

However, blocking will lead to another problem. The fact is that on Wikipedia, due to constant attacks by spammers, it is technically impossible to use open proxies, VPNs, Tor, etc. to edit articles. Accordingly, if the authorities block Wikipedia, Russians will still read it, but will no longer be able to edit it.

Texts will continue to be written and updated (albeit at a three times slower rate), but by Russian-speaking citizens from other countries, who, even trying to write as neutrally as possible, will unconsciously focus on the points of view that prevail in their countries. As a result, the texts will become less and less neutral.

Some people think that making an analogue of Wikipedia is not a problem. From the outside, it really looks very simple – the MediaWiki software engine that powers Wikipedia is free. Anyone can download and use it, the use of texts is also not limited by copyright, the database of all articles is laid out for download twice a month.

But it’s not enough just to copy texts. They must be constantly updated and supplemented. Now the community of editors of the Russian-language Wikipedia is doing this. It has been formed for more than 20 years, it is impossible to create an analogue quickly. It is not so easy to find volunteers willing to write encyclopedia articles, especially of high quality.

Now all the “Russian analogues of Wikipedia”, who copied Wikipedia articles and are looking forward to state funding, have practically no community. Even the most famous of them are served by only a few people who do not primarily write articles, but rather censor copied and outdated texts.

So far, the story with “analogues” is more reminiscent of the cargo cult of the natives of Melanesia, who created exact life-size copies of airplanes from straw, headphones from coconuts and mobile phones from a single piece of wood, which for some reason did not work.

Stanislav Kozlovsky, director of Wikimedia RU