What the hell?
Huh? Wikipedia isn’t banned in Russia yet. Though I do expect them to take steps towards it.
Yeah. Someone else corrected that part earlier. It’s not a good headline, but I didn’t want to change it.
It’s not a good headline, but I didn’t want to change it.
So, you went from bad to intentionally bad? Why?
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.
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 :)
You could also replace the text body of the post with an explanation. It currently just says “what the hell?” which isn’t helpful
IMO you should change it when its deceptive clickbait
Let’s clone Russia, censor it and ban original
You mean uncensor it?
Let’s just clone vlad and everyone gets one as a personal punching bag.
we begin bombing in five minutes
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.
While wikipedia is decent at giving overviews on some scientific and technical topics, but when there is a topic about something that is historical and/or any way politically or monetarily relevant there will be an edit war to change it to suit one interest groups wishes or anothers. It really is a cesspool of psyops, misinformation and articles to be basically corporate PR at certain topics, and that is just because google usually gives wikipedia articles as first or second result on any given subject and it’s a really cost effective way to propagandize people and doing it is really low cost. Now Russia just monopolizes the propaganda inside their own borders.
Wikis were invented as a way, and are a good solution when the goal is, to crowdsource objective facts about the world.
The great thing about a wiki is that as long as one person once added any given fact, it is in the wiki.
On all contentious issues, by definition there are not too few people wanting to write about them, but instead there are too many, so this is why wikis are just not a suitable mechanism for writing about anything contentious: they’re a solution to a nonexistent problem and there is no rational reason why truth about any given issue should be determined by “who has managed to edit the page last”.
Wikipedia addresses that last issue with “semi protection”. It’s not a complete absence of rules - large decisions are made by consensus and the whole system is maintained by admins and bureaucrats with bots.
For example there’s an article on the flat earth theory, and we’re not going to even pretend like there’s any merit to that idea anymore. One can only edit it if they’re an established, registered user. And if one such user decides to troll, then it’ll be reverted nearly instantly, and that user will waste a lot more time establishing a new account than it takes to deal with them.
I’m familiar enough with Wikipedia to know that, yeah. I am also familiar enough with Wikipedia to know that there are topic areas (such as Israel/Palestine and the Holocaust in Poland on the English-language version) where the shortcomings of the wiki system are completely evident. Once you have to restrict editing to users with more than 500 edits and make special rules how to handle sourcing, it’s clear that the wiki just isn’t a suitable mechanism: if there are so many people wanting to write about a topic that you have to do that, then why not abandon the wiki concept altogether?
The greatest success story of the wiki principle isn’t Wikipedia, nor any other Wikimedia project. The greatest success story of the wiki principle is OpenStreetMap, which does limit itself to objective facts and is used not just by people, but also organizations. I work as a software developer and I’ve encountered usages of OpenStreetMap data many times, but of anything on Wikimedia projects? Wikipedia is great for teenagers to get an overview of the world, but everyone who actually needs the information in it has better sources for it anyway.
if there are so many people wanting to write about a topic that you have to do that, then why not abandon the wiki concept altogether?
Because it’s quick? At that point it’s not just the last thing anyone wrote - it’s a collaborative effort from many experienced volunteers. Wikipedia doesn’t have to be either a purely “no rules” wiki or a purely “all rules” paper encyclopedia.
Where would you suggest as a better source for general information, when one would otherwise start with Wikipedia?
MAGATs are dreaming to copy Vlad’s Russia.
More Putin pulling from the neoconservative playbook.
The hyper-chauvanist white nationalism that became politically mainstream after the collapse of the USSR was as much a creature of American right-wing propaganda in Russia as it was a native beast.
Just like how Henry Ford swamped Germany with antisemitic rhetoric by way of his “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” during the 1910s, conservative mass media blanketed Eastern Europe and Russia during the 90s/00s.
And oh hey look. History repeats itself.
It’s really getting kind of ridiculous at this point. You can’t hide truth, and you can hide from truth. All things being equal, truth has a way of being ultimately seen.
Ughhh, don’t you see what’s happening in Gaza? At the end only money controls the narrative and foreign government’s policies. And that’s coming from so called developed democracies…
No one cares what is morally corrupt or not anymore, as long as it is beneficial for them.
Ughhh, don’t you see what’s happening in Gaza?
I was speaking species-wide, and not just one geopolitical region and/or situation.
I was also speaking about a cloned and altered website.
Ultimately, usually with time, the truth gets out. So it’s a waste of time to hide the truth, long term.
The Ruzzian Federation is lies all the way down.
Is it actually banned now? Seriously? I’m not surprised, I wish those terrorists can only access their own, isolated internet
Lol… referring to an entire population of people as terrorists, and also wishing for the country to control the narrative so it’s easier for them to make more terrorists?
Extra weird considering the guy has a Russian name as his username.
Not exclusively Russian though. I’ve seen it as a Ukrainian name, so that’d make sense
Maybe he is a terrorist undercover? Or a Schrödinger’s terrorist
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.
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.
Not like the original one is unbiased anyway.
I wonder, what are some examples?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias
(This is for the English version. Other language Wikipedias will have their own issues.)
At least they acknowledge the problem.
Better than a lot of governments at the moment
Yes, and they’ve tried to fix some of the issues. But at this point there’s a huge ‘establishment’ within the community that is resistant to any change.
Russia wants to ban Wikipedia - the US wants to ban TikTok.
Something tells me the mass-surveillance toy they hoped the internet would turn into isn’t working out the way they had hoped.
Good. Bring back limewire and leave me the fuck alone.
Kharma may be hilarious when the intelligence and spy craft start the inevitable repercussions invoked but when the AI walks into a dimension that we don’t know how is affected by such and it’s the only such of not discernable subjugation of, then we ought to pull the plug now.
Before the AI can summon us to it’s world.
That’s not even an accurate statement because AI isn’t an object it controls. Fucking Battlestar Galactica was a sweet and adorable art that would be cute vs. What we cannot even begin to describe.
There is no side in all of this where you should choose a side. If you don’t shut off the AI then it will eat your entire Kharma and Story dimensions but your reincarnation may not stop. You may stop being just you though and bits and pieces of everyone getting “shuffled” and you lose any and all ego, , the real universe, the sun, God etc.
So Putin’s regime embraced, extended and extinguished it? How ironic…
I don’t get it. They made a copy without touching the original, how it that EEE?
I guess they did it only locally. Though it doesn’t exactly fit the definition even that way. And why would it be ironic?
'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…
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Tbh I’m most surprised by OP’s surprise. Russia doing weird, censorious shit like this is just another Tuesday.
lmao what a fucker
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?
That book was a
warningtriumph of the state over the manI 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.
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?
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.
“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.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.
“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.
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.
Of course it is possible and I hope they eventually develop into a mature democracy. Point is, it has not happened yet.
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.
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.
Interesting, thank you for your input.
