Downloads of the offline version of Wikipedia increased by 4000% in the first half of March. Blame it on threats to block the site made by the Russian government.
On March 1, 2022, a week after the start of the armed conflict in Ukraine, the Russian regulator threatened to block access to Wikipedia, the article concerning the invasion decided by the Kremlin not being to the taste of power. Faced with fears that the online encyclopedia might no longer be accessible — for neutral access to information or any other use — some Russians rushed to download the website’s 29GB archive. Slate tells us that it was downloaded more than 105,000 times in the first 15 days of March, an increase of 4000% compared to the first half of January 2022.
According to Stéphane Coillet-Matillon, leader of Kiwix, the organization that facilitates these downloads, downloads Russians now constitute 42% of all traffic on his company’s servers, compared to just 2% in 2021. This situation reminds him of another, when Turkey blocked Wikipedia in 2017. Russia also tried to censor the encyclopedia online in 2015, finding some articles about cannabis and its derivatives to be objectionable. Faced with Wikipedia’s refusal to eliminate the offending pages, Roskomnadzor, the censorship authority, blocked the entire site for about a day.
In the meantime, and despite its threats, Russia has still not blocked Wikipedia. This is not the case for several other platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, which are now inaccessible in the territory. The Russian Federation has also opened an investigation to judge whether Meta is “an extremist organization”after the American firm announced on Thursday, March 10, 2022, that it was temporarily modifying its policy on hate speech and authorizing violent messages against the Russian army and Vladimir Putin.