The Russian military invasion of Ukraine is now entering its fourth week with no end in sight. Thanks to the Russian president Vladimir PutinAs a result, the country has largely isolated itself from the West, either through sanctions and boycotts or Russia itself cracking down on its citizens' access to information from the rest of the world.
One source of information that has been specifically attacked by the Kremlin: Wikipedia.
Realizing that this immense source of free knowledge may soon be taken away, those who live in Russia are downloading the full Russian version of Wikipedia to access the content offline if necessary.
Downloading the entirety of Wikipedia seems like a tall order. However, kiwix, an organization that runs a free web browser designed explicitly for offline reading, has helped make the process quite easy. The nonprofit organization has already compiled the 1.8 million articles found on the Russian-language version of Wikipedia as a downloadable torrent. (In case you're wondering, yes, Wikipedia terms allow this.) The file comes in at 29 GB.
reports for BoardWriter Annie Rawerda He dove into public Kiwix statistics and discovered that the number of downloads of Russian Wikipedia has skyrocketed in recent weeks. It has already been downloaded 148,457 times this month so far. As Rauwerda points out, that represents a more than 4,000 percent increase in downloads in March compared to January of this year.
Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (for short Roskomnadzor), also known as its censorship agency, threatened to block Wikipedia in the country earlier this month. The agency took issue with the Wikipedia entry on "Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022)The Wikipedia page on the events obviously does not follow the Kremlin's proposed propaganda around the war, and Russia wants to cut off access to any media that does not follow its official narrative.
Wikipedia responded a few days later and rejected Russia's demand that the free encyclopedia censor itself.
Russia has yet to ban Wikipedia, but many within the country fear the possibility is very real, as Kiwix's download statistics confirm. Putin has already forbidden social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Wikipedia can easily be next. That would not be the first time Russia blocked Wikipedia either.
The Kiwix Wikipedia torrent is one of the many tools that Russian citizens have used to resist being completely cut off from the outside world. With entries like "Russian Invasion of Ukraine (2022)" bringing unbiased facts to the people of Russia, it will be difficult for Putin to continue to successfully spread his own account of events. And that is an extremely important aspect to help end the war as well.
