Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine has largely isolated Russia from the West, whether through sanctions and boycotts or Russia itself restricting its citizens’ access to information from the rest of the world.
One of the sources of information targeted by the Kremlin is wikipedia.
Realizing that this immense source of free knowledge may soon disappear, those who live in Russia are downloading the entire Russian version from Wikipedia to be able to access the content offline if necessary.
Downloading all of Wikipedia seems like a daunting task. However, Kiwix, an organization that runs a free browser made explicitly for offline reading, helped make the process quite easy.
This non-profit organization has already collected the 1.8 million articles from the Russian version of Wikipedia in the form of a 29 GB torrent for download.
The number of Russian Wikipedia downloads has skyrocketed in recent weeks. So far, it has been downloaded 148,457 times this month. This supposed a more than 4,000% increase in downloads in March compared to January this year.
Russia’s Federal Communications, Information Technology and Media Supervision Service acts as a censorship agency and threatened to block Wikipedia in the country earlier this month.
The agency disagreed with the Wikipedia entry on “Russian Invasion of Ukraine (2022)” as it 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.
Russia still hasn’t banned Wikipedia, but many in the country fear the possibility is very real, as Kiwix’s download statistics show. Putin has already banned social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, so Wikipedia could easily be next.