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In the media

What's on Putin's fork, the court's docket, and in Harrison's book?

Putin's fork follies

Vladimir Putin with Yevgeny Prigozhin, a 2010 photo from government.ru that the Putinist censor did not remove.

The Economist [1] (paywalled, syndicated here) notes that Ruwiki.ru, Putin's fork of the real Russian Wikipedia, censors "the sensitive zones of Putinist ideology: LGBT rights, oral sex, Soviet history, and the war in Ukraine." (See also The Signpost's June 2023 coverage about the project's genesis: "Wikimedia Russia director starts Russian fork and is replaced").

The Week expands upon the Economist article (also on Yahoo News). It states that the majority of the articles on Putin's fork are just copies from the real Russian Wikipedia, but gives five articles from the real Russian Wikipedia as examples of heavy censorship: Yevgeny Prigozhin, Battle of Bucha, Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Oral sex and Russian-Ukrainian war (starting in 2014).

This reporter has examined how Putin's fork covered those subjects.

  • There is no article on Putin's fork on the Russian-Ukrainian war starting in 2014.
  • The article on Prigozhin does not include a sentence in the real Russian Wikipedia, "According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW)... the order to kill Prigozhin was almost certainly given by Putin." But it does include a photo of Putin and Prigozhin together, that might be embarrassing to Putin.
  • The battle of Bucha is best represented on Putin's fork in a section of the article Military operations in Ukraine (since 2022) named Incident in Bucha which essentially denies that an incident occurred. As The Signpost noted in January, an entry corresponding to the Wikidata item for Bucha massacre was also deleted from what appears to be a fork of Wikidata on the ruwiki.ru website, titled "РУВИКИ.Данные" ("RUWIKI.Data"), according to that wiki's deletion log (archive).
  • The Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal has an article of the same name in Putin's fork. About 64% of the article has been removed, but almost all of the photos of related buildings and other locations have been kept.
  • The article on oral sex is about one-third the length of the article on the real Russian Wikipedia and all 3 illustrations have been removed.

Meduza [2] and Invariant-T [3], two Russian news websites which are considered "foreign agents" in Russia, report that the Great Russian Encyclopedia (BRE) has lost its state funding, maybe in favor of Ruviki and Znanie (Knowledge), another state-funded educational site.

BRE announced its closure last month, saying that it had received no funds in the previous five months. Though wages and author royalties have not been paid during that time about 6,000 new articles have been posted. According to the announcement,

both resources of the Great Russian Encyclopedia - the portal and the electronic version of the printed edition - have published more than 100 thousand articles, and the number of reader requests to our encyclopedia reaches 1 million per week. We - more than 300 editorial staff and a team of 7,000 authors - are now able to prepare and publish up to 30 thousand scientifically verified articles per year.

S

Indian news agency sues Wikipedia over article

Ektara, from the 2018 Wikimedia Foundation television outreach campaign in India.

Mass media in India continues to take an interest in how the government of India reacts to Wikipedia in India. The Hindu [4] and Outlook [5] report that media house Asian News International (ANI) objects to the Wikipedia's article about ANI.

According to The Hindu;

The case pits, potentially for the first time in such a significant way, Wikipedia’s volunteer-centric editorial norms against Indian regulations like the IT Rules, 2021, which require all loosely defined internet "intermediaries" to take action against content online if it is, among other things, defamatory, and a court or government order is issued against them.

The court case is scheduled for August 20 with ANI claiming damages of 2 crore rupees – about US$240,000.

Live Law, a legal reporting service, states (archive) that ANI's plea (or complaint) claims that "Wikipedia had closed the ANI page for editing by the news agency except for its own (Wikipedia) editors". This suggests that ANI is claiming a right to have its own employees edit the article despite Wikipedia's policy prohibiting undeclared paid editors.

Live Law also says that "ANI has alleged that Wikimedia, through its officials, has actively participated in removing the edits to reverse the content." This claim appears to confuse actions by unpaid volunteers with actions by Wikimedia Foundation employees.

The Wikipedia article appears to summarize and cite reliable journalism covering ANI, and the complaint seems not to be about the journalism, but rather that Wikipedia presents what journalists wrote elsewhere then links to those articles.

One possible complication is that the Wikipedia community does not consider ANI to be a generally reliable source. The report at The Wikipedia project Reliable sources/Perennial sources says

For general reporting, Asian News International is considered to be between marginally reliable and generally unreliable, with consensus that it is biased and that it should be attributed in-text for contentious claims. For its coverage related to Indian domestic politics, foreign politics, and other topics in which the Government of India may have an established stake, there is consensus that Asian News International is questionable and generally unreliable due to its reported dissemination of pro-government propaganda.

This view is based on a 2021 request for comment where a BBC news report on disinformation in India was prominently mentioned.

- S, BR

Harrison interviewed on forthcoming novel

Wikipedia beat reporter Stephen Harrison, whose novel The Editors will be published August 13, was interviewed at least three times this month. The editor of Student Life, the student newspaper at Washington University in St. Louis where Harrison attended, published a long, detailed interview which gives the best overview of Harrison's career, but is mostly about the new novel, and about Wikipedia and its fictionalized version, Infopendium, which is the focus of the story.

Harrison has started another book, a murder mystery set at the Federal Reserve, where he used to work.

it gets into what I am really interested in, which are institutions that are experiencing a crisis. The Fed currently fits that description — people are not happy about inflation, and there’s even questions about: what is money, and what is currency?

Another interview, posted at Medium by Taylor Dibbert, focuses on Harrison's writing routine. He tries to write 1–2 hours a day before going to his day job as a lawyer, but first he starts with a cup of coffee and reading 15 minutes worth of fiction. He starts writing with his favorite pen and paper, but often switches to computer.

Citing the epigraph of the forthcoming book "this is a reported work of fiction", Harrrison continues "ultimately, I hope to be known for producing smart and well-researched stories throughout my career."

A third interview, this one by Caitlin Dewey on her "Links" blog, is more quirky. She starts with a question about "the four 'periods' of Wikipedia journalism", citing an essay Harrison co-authored with Omer Benjakob for the book Wikipedia @ 20 which was reprinted in The Signpost. Which period does the novel take place in? Harrison invents a new period and answers it "falls in the pre-AI, post-glory-days period of Wikipedia."

Dewey also asks about whether Wikipedia is past its glory days, and about Harrison's day-to-day interaction with Wikipedians, as well as about celebrity Wikipedians.

In brief

Embrace me, my sweet embraceable ewe
Conservapedia reports Einstein's liberal theories



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  • Obviously she has never read the articles - huh? TrangaBellam (talk) 10:04, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • Whoops! From the X photo it should be "He". Good catch. I'll change "she" to "Hussain" (to avoid any confusion with "Trump"). And "obviously" is probably not the best word, the only thing obvious here is that different people have different views on what is the most amazing article. Smallbones(smalltalk) 12:54, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are different spellings in the article — ruwiki and ruviki. Also, it's funny that the main fork, the one that was started by former Wikipedia admins before Ruwiki was even announced, is almost never mentioned in the various articles about Wikipedia forks. BilboBeggins (talk) 14:51, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • The single use of the word Ruviki in the article was included because the source used that word. RuWiki again was used because a link used the word. I think the most obnoxious thing about Putin's fork was that they stole the name RuWiki. It completely gives away their game, the fork is trying to pretend it's the real Russian Wikipedia, it's not. I think that people who intentionally try to confuse the issue also give themselves away. Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:01, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • "But it does include a photo of Putin and Prigozhin together, that might be embarrassing to Putin" - not really. A twenty-meter-wide memorial to Prigozhin and company, just 360 meters from the Kremlin wall, next to the FSO block - apparently does not offend him. Neither does the tag line "memorial Ye. V. Prigozhinu and D. V. Utkinu" (sic, direct transliteration from ru) on Yandex maps, both ru and en editions. Why would then anyone care about some below-the-radar wikiclone? Retired electrician (talk) 23:37, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • A bunch of flowers, some photos, and a banner or two that are up for only a week or so are not going to embarrass Putin. A photo of him standing besides a man he reportedly ordered murdered should if he isn't beneath having shame. Isn't this just the latest example of his claim of having them "liquidated in the outhouse"? Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:01, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      Not a week but almost a year. Not one banner but dozens. It's still there, daily maintained. Retired electrician (talk) 11:40, 24 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delhi is misspelled as Dehli (in the last sentence of the article). Ciridae (talk) 08:39, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

















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