Vladimir Medeiko dismissed as director of Wikimedia Ru – Kommersant

Vladimir Medeiko stepped down as director of the non-profit partnership Wikimedia Ru, which develops the Russian-language Wikipedia. The partnership will be led by Stanislav Kozlovsky, who served as an executive director in the organization. Earlier, Mr. Kozlovsky said that the team intends to discuss the dismissal of Mr. Medeiko in connection with his work on the Russian analogue of the Internet encyclopedia.

“I submitted an application and it has already been confirmed, I left Wikimedia ru. And now we will tune in as much as possible to the new Free Encyclopedia project,” Medeiko said TASS. Vladimir Medeiko publicly announced the work on the new encyclopedia for the first time. Colleagues at Wikimedia Ru did not know about his activities.

“Anyone can make their own projects, this is not forbidden to anyone, and Wikipedia is distributed under a free license, anyone can take Wikipedia content and use it, this is completely normal. It is not normal to use the powers of the director of Wikimedia RU for this and to do this completely secretly for several years,” Mr. Kozlovsky pointed out. RTVI.

Mr. Medeiko emphasized that the Free Encyclopedia was not created secretly, but “simply not publicly.” “Such projects are not made from beginning to end for the public,” he said.

In the spring of 2022, Roskomnadzor repeatedly threatened Wikipedia was blocked for posting articles containing information about the actions of the Russian armed forces (AF) during the military operation in Ukraine. In July, the agency ordered Russian search engines to flag the online encyclopedia as violating Russian law. August online appeared analogue of “Wikipedia” – “Runiversalis” (the site is still available). However, already in December, Maksut Shadayev, head of the Ministry of Digital Development, noticed journalists to another portal – “Knowledge”, the launch of which was planned for the beginning of 2023.

Grigory Leiba