Ruviki is intended to be a more “trustworthy” source of information for Russians by editing out anything that makes the Russian government look bad.

What the hell?

  • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    256·
    2 months ago

    Graphic designer Constantine Konovalov calculated the number of characters changed between Wikipedia RU and Ruviki articles on the same topics, and found that there were 205,000 changes in articles about freedom of speech; 158,000 changes in articles about human rights; 96,000 changes in articles about political prisoners; and 71,000 changes in articles about censorship in Russia. He wrote in a post on X that the censorship was “straight out of a 1984 novel.”

    Interestingly, the Ruviki article about George Orwell’s 1984 entirely omits the Ministry of Truth, which is the novel’s main propaganda outlet concerned with governing “truth” in the country.

    That last detail…wow. They really don’t want to leave any doubt about what they’re doing, do they?

    • bobs_monkey@lemm.eeEnglish
      521·
      2 months ago

      I have to wonder, don’t the majority of Russians pretty much know that their government is full of shit? There’s enough of the population old enough to see the fall of the USSR, the time between the fall and the rise of Putin, and then every bit of Putin’s transition to autocracy, to the point that there’s enough word of mouth in private to counter the majority propaganda. Granted, the younger generations will grow up not knowing anything else, especially with older generations dying off or getting killed either via war or suicided by falling out of windows.

      • conditional_soup@lemm.eeEnglish
        712·
        2 months ago

        They do know, but they honestly, sincerely believe that a government of for and by the people isn’t possible for them.

        Source: hosted a Russian exchange student. We had this talk, I suggested that Russia could have a state that works for its people and got laughed at and basically told “we don’t do that here.” And honestly, as an American in 2024 watching our democracy implode in real time so that billionaires can have lower taxes, I get it.

      • humbletightband@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        56·
        2 months ago

        I have to wonder, don’t the majority of Russians pretty much know that their government is full of shit?

        Let me offer my perspective,as a Russian. People do not want to lose everything like they did in the 90s. Yes, everyone understands that the government is full of shit, but they believe in the belief (google it, an interesting concept) that it’s virtuous to support a government.

        It’s like a classic trolley problem. Yes, you’d probably push that lever, but you know of consequences and you just purchased a car and your wife is pregnant. You are caught in this unending circle, you simply do not want to deal with it because it doesn’t affect you. But when it does affect you, it’s always the west: shock therapy of the 90s, current sanctions, debit card ban, visa bans, etc.

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        331·
        2 months ago

        It doesn’t really matter because Russians have never really had a mature democracy and so, I think, do not really know how it should/could be different. They are used to various forms of authoritarian rule; whether the leader is called a Tsar, or a General Secretary of the Communist Party, or a President of the Russian Federation doesn’t make that much difference.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          16·
          2 months ago

          Well, that was also true in Korea and Japan before WW2, yet both are shining examples of democracy (with a healthy amount of chaebol/Keiretsu/oligopoly to round it out). Likewise in Germany.

          So it’s not impossible, just foreign.

          • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            6·
            2 months ago

            Of course it is possible and I hope they eventually develop into a mature democracy. Point is, it has not happened yet.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
          16·
          2 months ago

          “Mature democracies” buy Russian gas and support Azerbaijan.

          Nothing in the past makes an existing democracy more stable.

          What does is culture of bravery\heroics AND fairness AND individualism. Bravery AND fairness without individualism get you communism. Bravery AND individualism without fairness get you either the British Empire or Somalia. Bravery without fairness and individualism get you fascism. Individualism AND fairness without bravery lead to something like most “mature democracies” of today.

          Now, Russia has problems in culture with every one of these. Each of them pops up locally here and there in the social fabric, but the lumpen layers don’t like the idea of fairness and bravery, while the worker class, so to say, doesn’t like the idea of individualism, and the “well off” people are similar to the lumpen class sometimes in this. Bravery is the one most lacking, though.

      • Aux@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16·
        2 months ago

        Life in Russia is ridiculously tough if you don’t live in a major city like Moscow or St. Petersburg and don’t have a decent job. People don’t really have time to think about Putin and politics, they have to survive. I have some distant relatives there, man is a truck driver, his wife is a teacher. The guy goes hunting and fishing regularly to have food on the table. Can you imagine hunting to survive in a developed country? Can you imagine thinking about politics in these conditions?

        • ma1w4re@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Bruh. Where do they live? I live in a cul-de-sac shit hole with low af pay and nobody seriously goes fishing or hunting to survive. It’s a hobby in every single case.

      • Mac@mander.xyzEnglish
        152·
        2 months ago

        “i have to wonder…full of shit”
        think about how many poeple voted for and continue to vote for Trump and republicans in general here in the US when they have a long and obvious track record.

      • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        2 months ago

        One other part of the factor that isn’t often mentioned. Is that they believe and in some small aspects are not mistaken. That the US government is just as corrupt manipulative and bad as theirs. And see critique of their government as hypocrisy. And a lot of Americans feel the same under similar critique.

  • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1063·
    2 months ago

    Doesn’t seem to be banned by my ISP.

    Anyway, Russian Wikipedia clones to steal budget money are old news.

    There even is such a meme as “encyclong”, that’s what the Wikipedia article for vikings turned into after one such cloning with replacing wiki- (no difference between V and W in Russian) with encyclo- .

    • otogiri46@programming.devOPEnglish
      46·
      2 months ago

      Really? Good to hear it’s just an ineffective censorship attempt then.

      There even is such a meme as “encyclong”, that’s what the Wikipedia article for vikings turned into after one such cloning with replacing wiki- (no difference between V and W in Russian) with encyclo- .

      Damn that’s funny.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        I don’t think there was an attempt, “bans original” is a hallucination by the author.

    • lurch@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      26·
      2 months ago

      lmao the encyclongs raiding the villages again. genius. never heard of that before either. 🤣

  • Axiochus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    871·
    2 months ago

    Huh? Wikipedia isn’t banned in Russia yet. Though I do expect them to take steps towards it.

    • otogiri46@programming.devOPEnglish
      337·
      2 months ago

      Yeah. Someone else corrected that part earlier. It’s not a good headline, but I didn’t want to change it.

        • otogiri46@programming.devOPEnglish
          262·
          2 months ago

          It’s not in the rules of the community but some places are not okay with changing headlines. So I left it how it was.

          • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
            8·
            2 months ago

            Not the person you replied to- you could consider adding a correction or [sic] or something while still including the original headline unedited

            Hope you have a good day :)

            • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
              11·
              2 months ago

              You could also replace the text body of the post with an explanation. It currently just says “what the hell?” which isn’t helpful

    • jabjoe@feddit.ukEnglish
      44·
      2 months ago

      Nope. The vandalism is by the troll farms and a weapon of the quiet information war waging against reality.

  • Reddfugee42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    2 months ago

    Of course, all you need to do is run a differential between Wikipedia and this thing to find exactly what the government is trying to censor. Idiots.

    • Diplomjodler@lemmy.worldEnglish
      30·
      2 months ago

      That would be a cool project. You’d basically see everything the Russian regime doesn’t want you to see, i.e. all the interesting bits.

    • gian @lemmy.grys.itEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      Why do you think that Russia would care to include the edits from the original Wikipedia ?

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      Russian Wikipedians will be quick to demand reliable sources for any text copied over. And they’ll probably have bots to check if anything is copied over without attribution. In the end it’ll probably be a trickle of usable information, like all the other wikis.

      The new site just won’t keep up and degrade quickly, even by their own standards.

  • Allero@lemmy.todayEnglish
    27·
    2 months ago

    Wikipedia is not currently banned in Russia.

    But the Russian branch of Wikimedia as an organization is.

    Also, pretty much nobody in Russia uses Ruwiki, everyone keeps using Wikipedia.

    That’s all not to say it isn’t a troubling development, though. But Russians are more likely to access Wikipedia through VPN than to rely on Ruwiki. The game’s not lost.

    Edit: Thank you OP for striving for the best accuracy!

      • Emmie@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        I guess they did it only locally. Though it doesn’t exactly fit the definition even that way. And why would it be ironic?

        • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
          41·
          2 months ago

          'Cos that tactic is Microsoft™.

          Then again the Russian Federation is a fascist state run by oligarchs, so not that much different from the fascist state run by billionaire CEOs that the US is…

          • Emmie@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            Seriously? Ehh…

            Of course Russia is facist though, what else would it be? Maybe you got it wrong with a historic non existing failed country created by absolute psychopaths?

  • baseless_discourse@mander.xyzEnglish
    21·
    2 months ago

    Must be nice, in China we only have the poorly formatted, lack-of-citation garbage that is Baidu Baike https://baike.baidu.com/ .

    The “sorting algorithm” article: https://baike.baidu.com/item/排序算法/5399605 only have 3 citations: none of which are the original papers and none of which have any links. I tried searching these “citations” and found absolutely nothing…

    Similarly, the article for “Amsterdam” contains almost no citation beyond the first paragraph https://baike.baidu.com/item/阿姆斯特丹/814

    Just imagine how bad it would be for more obscure concepts.

  • atocci@kbin.social
    21·
    2 months ago

    From the top of the page:

    Ruviki 2.0 is in beta | Report bugs

    Trying to pass this clone off as an “update” to actual Wikipedia lol