What the hell?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
“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.
That book was a
warningtriumph of the state over the man
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- .
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.
lmao the encyclongs raiding the villages again. genius. never heard of that before either. 🤣
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.
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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.
Cool, so less Wikipedia vandalism for the rest of us!
Headline is just a lie, its not banned
Nope. The vandalism is by the troll farms and a weapon of the quiet information war waging against reality.
Give it 5 years and I bet Florida does the same.
There’s already Conservapedia.
Filled with “alternative facts”?
The 2021 Capitol protests also known as the J6 FBI false flag attack on the U.S. Capitol or Fedsurrection consisted of a diverse group of American patriots of different races, backgrounds, and cultures protesting the electoral college certification of the fraudulent 2020 presidential election who were entrapped by the FBI on January 6, 2021.
I just threw up a little just visiting for 5 seconds.
Just a little?
Last I knew they called the Russia-Ukraine war the “NATO War in Ukraine” and claimed Russia killed over 10,000 “NATO mercenaries” mostly from Germany.
Very much so. Last I heard the userbase was composed of roughly half truly sincere ultra-conservative nut and half parody accounts attempting to portray ultra-conservative views too extreme and nutty for the sincere ultra-conservatives, and nobody could tell who was what.
Poe’s Law in action.
I think that’s satire? I’m not sure, but it feels like satire.
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
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disable the edit button. easy.
The Ruzzian Federation is lies all the way down.
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
Humans are stupid. We should just start over.
Issue reviewed and closed by WorldProgrammer73993224499 with comment: “Rewrite too expensive and complex, closing.”
“Could not stop them from reproducing”
Humans are selfish by definition (genes). It would be like rewinding a film and starting over.
The main problem lies within humans’ tendency to put themselves (their family/tribe/culture/etc.) before others’. I know there are fantastic people who don’t, but in the grand scheme of things, humanity will always be too selfish in general. I’d bet that will be our bane (we’re kind of slowly killing ourselves with it already).
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But they wanted to avoid being stupid. We need intelligent design (no not that intelligent design, actual intelligence).
It’s inevitable at this point. Natural evolution is a snail’s pace compared to what we can already do. It’s mostly just ethics that’s stopping us.
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We are working on the start over. Will look like a dead end, somehow.
MAGATs are dreaming to copy Vlad’s Russia.
What the hell?
The only surprise in this news is that the “more like this” sidebar is filled with porn for some reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2024-04-25/In_the_media Wikipedia’s own coverage, released 4 days ago. The repetition of the Orwellian detail makes me think both were inspired by Novaya Gazeta’s coverage from the 11th.
Back in my day it was just boob edits.
The gaslighting is crazy
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”.
The downside - and I’m in favour of wikis like Wikipedia - is that any yahoo or otherwise can also put misinformation in there, perhaps even in good faith, and that’s in the wiki forever too.
And those who comb through article histories will have to contend with both the truth (we hope, whether we like it or not) as well as the nonsense.
One other difficulty is Internet-based sources disappearing or re-formatting, breaking links from Wikipedia and other places. This is the reader’s reminder to donate to the Internet Archive if not Wikipedia itself, providing you can spare a little money to throw their way.
Speaking of the archive: Anyone know whether Russia blocks the archive or maintains their own equivalent?
