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Putin's Wiki-censor
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How does censorship work? In Russia, you can start with intentionally sowing confusion about the name of your brand new website, by calling it essentially the same name as the website you are trying to censor. In this case, "Рувики" in
So let's call a spade a spade. We'll call the legitimate Russian Wikipedia (ru.wikipedia.org) by it's common on-Wiki name, RuWiki. It is being forked with the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime by an imposter website (ru.ruwiki.ru) that we'll call Ruviki.
Novaya Gazeta reports how Ruviki, has been operating since its official January 15 launch. Almost all of RuWiki's 1.9 million pages have been copied, and are then censored to comply with Russian law, editing them to "delete everything that raises even the slightest doubt" about compliance with Russian media law – at least in the words of Vladimir Medeyko. In general, the censor mostly edits politically sensitive topics involving the Russian government’s policies on free speech, human rights and, most notably, the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Medeyko was the long time director of Wikimedia RU (aka Wikimedia Russia), a Wikimedia Foundation affiliate intended to support WMF projects in Russia. He launched Ruviki's beta version back in May 2023 and was soon stripped of his position of director of Wikimedia RU by the organization's members and also banned indefinitely from editing all Wikimedia sites by the WMF.
Medeyko's post at Wikimedia RU was taken by Stas Kozlovsky, who in turn announced the dissolution of the organization in December 2023, after being forced to resign from his job as associate professor at Moscow State University, and then included in the Russian government’s foreign agent blacklist.
According to Novaya Gazeta, about 110 Wikipedia pages about the war in Ukraine have been cut entirely from Ruviki, while graphic designer Konstantin Konovalov, who tabulated the number of characters changed for every major category of Ruviki articles following their copying from RuWiki, compared the extensive censorship process to "something out of [...]
Moreover, Ruviki users have attempted to minimize the influence of sources from Russian independent media, by deleting most of the links to Novaya Gazeta itself – deleting references to articles penned by the assasinated journalist
The way we were, or the way we are?
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Meanwhile Russian billionaires are trying to hide their ties with the Kremlin by editing Wikipedia pages, according to
Two musical interludes
San Francisco's heated political debate overflows into Wikipedia
In a year full of key elections, including one in the U.S. and another one over in Europe, the city of San Francisco is no exception. Its citizens will line up to vote in November to decide who will be the new Mayor, District Attorney, and the new members of the local Board of Supervisors. As reported by the San Francisco Examiner, the local political debate has become so heated that it has spilled into Wikipedia articles on several prominent candidates: "The City" is where the Wikimedia Foundation has its headquarters.
The Examiner report focuses on edit wars involving local supervisors and their views on the housing shortage affecting San Francisco – which the city’s administration tried to tackle directly last year, by announcing a plan to build more than 80,000 new housing units by 2031. According to the data collected by the newspaper, the total number of edits made to the Board members’ pages has increased significantly from 2022 to 2023, and 2024 could soon set a new record, since 164 revisions have been made in this year’s first quarter alone. Four supervisors who have gained the most attention are Dean Preston and Connie Chan, who are seeking re-election, and Ahsha Safaí and Aaron Peskin, who have both switched to the mayoral race.
Preston has become the subject of the fiercest virtual battle. The
Taylor Tomlinson hosts a wikirace on live TV - again !
In a recent episode of the
Once the three panelists submitted their final guesses to Tomlinson, who reminded the show's audience of how Wikipedia is "the most educational way to waste your time", she finally revealed the solution to the enigma: we have to click four times to go from the actor last seen in Priscilla and Saltburn, to Vin Diesel, to Greenwich Village, to Wouter van Twiller, to the infamous Dutch chartered company. Obviously, there are potentially unlimited combinations of pages hiding behind wikiraces like this one, but as for Tomlinson's own disclaimer: "This is a comedy show, not an accuracy show!"
Something we can all agree on, though, is that Taylor and the After Midnight staff have seemingly fallen in love with our encyclopedia and its comedic potential, quite like that English baby who grew really fond of his brother's finger back in the day. Well, the love is mutual! – O
In brief
- Baltimore bridge hoax: Jewish space lasersmight have been deployed.
- Blind faith: Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR) reports about a study by University of Tartu researchers showing that Estonian schoolchildren frequently use Wikipedia for school assignments and to find information quickly, although teachers often tend to consider the platform "a nuisance", fearing that their students might "place blind faith" on the encyclopedia's content. See this issue's Recent researchcolumn for more details.
- 149 Montgomery Street default: The new owners of the former Wikimedia Foundation Headquarters building went into default, amid a crash in San Francisco office space rental rates – the building's value is down 40% since the 2010s, according to The Real Deal.
- Jonathan Livingston... Seagullis?: Conservative Party. Acts of vandalism include changing his last name to Seagullis as a reference to a Redditmeme.
- Wikipedia music video: As reported by The Times of India, Punjabi artist Shaami dedicated his new song to none other than Wikipedia itself. If the words "Oh check kar wikipedia aaunda piche media..." aren't stuck in your head yet, give this a listen!
- One day, all this will be yours... too: In a recent interview for The Line of Best Fit, British singer-songwriter Fabiana Palladino, the daughter of experienced bassist Pino, acknowledged to be "someone with a parent whose name on Wikipedia is blue", while breaking down her own musical path and the production process of her recently released debut album.
- Will the real King of Wikipedia please stand up?: The Majorca Daily Bulletin names King of Rock and Roll(177), Donald Trump (236), and Jesus Christ (264). Game, set, and match.
- Maryana Iskander joins Mellon Foundation Board of Trustees: Mellon Foundation is old, rich, influential, and prestigious, even more so than the Wikimedia Foundation.
- Roman sites... and Juliet: Wikimedia Italy. Last fall, Chemello and fellow Wikipedian Piergiovanna Grossi co-hosted a workshop that allowed volunteers to update and expand articles about the archaeological sites within Verona's city centre, as part of the GLAM-Wikiglobal initiative.
- Subtitle: "NPR CEO Katherine Maher Says She Coordinated With Government To Censor Misinformation As CEO Of Wikipedia" [2]
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