Russian Wikipedia’s Top Editor Leaves to Launch a Putin-Friendly Clone
The move is seen as a potential precursor to a ban on the original version.
Illustration: Chantal Jahchan for Bloomberg Businessweek
When a group of armed mercenaries seized a Russian regional capital and began marching toward Moscow in late June, verified information was hard to come by. Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine largely ignored the Wagner Group’s mutiny at first, while government censors quickly blocked access to Google News through the country’s largest internet providers and hid results for certain searches, such as those for the rebels’ leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, on the Russian search engine Yandex.
An exception was the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia, which posted a detailed article in Russian about the uprising that incorporated new reporting as it happened. The article, “The Mutiny of the Wagner Group,” cited sources ranging from news media outlets that the Kremlin labels “foreign agents” for not toeing the party line to US newspapers and Russian state media, and is thousands of words long. It drew more than 270,000 page views on its first day.