Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the Russian government has blocked access in the country to many platforms that can provide information different from theirs. Wikipedia is not there yet, but is threatened, so many Russians have started downloading pages written in their language to preserve some access to information.
An investigation by the American media Slate reveals that tens of thousands of downloads have been made on Russian pages alone since the start of the war.
preserve knowledge
Facebook and Instagram have just been completely banned in Russia for “extremist” activities according to Vladimir Putin’s government. Following the very numerous sanctions and shutdowns of the services of the Western digital giants, Russia is counter-attacking by purely and simply blocking the major social platforms throughout the territory, which could provide information different from that of the media in power. Russia even threatened to block Wikipedia, leading to a major increase in downloads of the giant digital encyclopedia’s Russian pages.
This is the US site Slate who conducted the survey observing a significant surge in numbers coming from Russia to the site Kiwix. The media has noted a marked increase in downloads of the Russian Wikipedia on the site since the start of the invasion of Ukraine by the armed forces of the country of the Tsars. Since the beginning of March, and at the time of writing, there have been more than 150,000 downloads, mostly of the Russian pages of the encyclopedia.
According to Kiwix boss Stéphane Coillet-Matillon, Russian downloads now account for 42% of all traffic on Kiwix servers compared to just 2% before the war. Thousands of people therefore who have decided to keep in a corner access to knowledge that wants to be as objective as possible, taking up only 29 GB for the Russian version.
Controlled Information in Wartime
Kiwix is free software that allows you to download entire web pages and read them offline. The main objective of the association is to allow regions with poor internet or no internet at all to have access to important content and knowledge shared by millions of users (Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg).
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the number of visits from Russia to the site has also increased sharply, with 11,000 visits from the country since the beginning of March, far ahead of the second country in terms of visits: United States and the 4,693 visits. Many of the Russian visits are seen to come from unknown locations, with many Russians using VPNs or the Tor browser to circumvent state restrictions.
Wikipedia and its army of contributors around the world have always been a target for state propaganda, whether they choose to edit pages themselves or threaten to block access to the platform altogether. A few days ago, a Belarusian contributor was arrested for having, according to the authorities, “ spread false anti-Russian information “. The site was even blocked for 24 hours in Russia in 2015.
On the same subject :
Does Russia really want to disconnect from the web?
Source: Slate
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