The Russian Wikipedia project, mentioned by State Duma deputy Anton Gorelkin, was created “secretly” by two representatives of Wikimedia.Ru (supports the Russian version of Wikipedia). This was reported to socialbites.ca by Stanislav Kozlovsky, executive director of this non-profit partnership.
“It turned out that there were two people who were secretly doing this project. (One of them is socialbites.ca) Vladimir Medeiko is the administrator of Wikimedia.Ru. There will be a meeting today where they will discuss how this is a conflict of interest. In general, all this was done secretly by two people. Wikipedia allows anyone to create projects. The MediaWiki engine that powers Wikipedia is free. And the Wikipedia content is on a free license. So, please, anyone can make a clone of Wikipedia, that’s fine. Well this takes about 15 minutes… Good luck. The only unpleasant thing, of course, is that it was done on behalf of Wikimedia.Ru, ”said Kozlovsky.
Anton Gorelkin, member of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications, wrote on the Telegram channel about the creation of the Russian Wikipedia. According to him, Ruviki will be hosted on Russian servers and managed by a Russian legal entity.
“But what is most surprising to me is the same people who have been working on the Russian section of Wikipedia all this time and can’t do anything to make sure it doesn’t turn into a scam,” said Gorelkin.
Gorelkin also wished Ruvika good luck and said that he would closely monitor the development of the project.
In August 2022, Runiversalis, a local analogue of Wikipedia, was already launched in Russia. State Duma deputy Anton Gorelkin also gave information about the project. He said the encyclopedia is powered by a wiki engine, but is “not bound by the policies implemented by the Wikimedia Foundation.” The Runiversalis website stopped working on launch day, it is now available. The word of the day is a quote from Vladimir Putin.