Medinsky proposed copying 99.9% of Wikipedia into a Russian analogue

Assistant to the President of Russia Vladimir Medinsky suggested copying articles from Wikipedia and transferring them to the Knowledge.Wiki portal so as not to “produce entities.” He clarified that 22 thousand articles have been uploaded to the project, and about 70 million materials have been uploaded to Wikipedia.

“In general, we like to create new entities from scratch and try to catch up with someone… It seems to me that now is the time not to create new content from scratch, it’s difficult, but the time to aggregate and use other people’s content. You just need to secure it, that’s all, see how you can do it better,” said Vladimir Medinsky at a meeting of the supervisory board of the Znanie society (quoted from TASS).

According to him, 99.9% of publications on Wikipedia are “not harmful, absolutely neutral and even interesting.” The presidential aide said that the remaining 0.1% of articles are “enemy slander”, which is “strictly moderated.”

After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, Roskomnadzor threatened Wikipedia was blocked for an article about a military operation. In March 2022, the department transferred the site manager to the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to the register of companies for “landing” in Russia. Head of the Ministry of Digital Development Maksut Shadayev saidthat by the end of 2022, more than 100 thousand articles had been published in the Russian analogue of Wikipedia, and there are no plans to block the foreign service.

In December 2023, director of the Russian-language Wikipedia community Stanislav Kozlovsky (declared a foreign agent) reported on the closure of Wikimedia.ru (it supports wiki projects in the Russian Federation, but does not control the encyclopedia website). Before this, he said that the management of the psychology department of Moscow State University, where he worked as an assistant professor, suggested that he resign due to possible inclusion in the register of foreign agents. The Russian Ministry of Justice declared him a foreign agent on February 2, 2024.

More details in the text “Kommersant” “Wikipedia is left without Wikimedia”.

Petr Buzlaev