Early years The Russian Wikipedia was created on 20 May 2001 in the first wave of non-English Wikipedias, along with editions in
Catalan,
Chinese,
Dutch,
German,
Esperanto,
French,
Hebrew,
Italian,
Japanese,
Portuguese,
Spanish, and
Swedish. The first edit of the Russian Wikipedia was on 24 May 2001, and consisted of the line ("
Russia is a great nation"). The following edit changed it to the joke: ("
Russia is the motherland of elephants (big-eared, improved cross-country capability, see Mammoth.") For a long time development was slow (especially after some participants left for WikiZnanie), but in the 12-month period between February 2005 and February 2006 it surpassed nine editions in other languages – the Catalan, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Finnish, Norwegian, Chinese, Esperanto, and Danish Wikipedias. In 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2010 the Russian Wikipedia won the "Science and education" category of the "
Runet Prize" () award, supervised by the
Russian government agency
FAPMC.
Troubles with the Russian government On 10 July 2012, Russian Wikipedia closed access to its content for 24 hours in protest against proposed amendments to Russia's Information Act (
Bill No. 89417-6) regulating the accessibility of Internet-based information to children. Among other things, the bill stipulates the creation and country-wide enforcement of
blacklists, which would block access to forbidden sites. Several aspects of this amendment drew criticism from various civil rights activists and Internet providers. Supporters of the amendment stated that it is aimed only at widely prohibited content such as
child pornography and similar information, but the Russian
Wikimedia chapter has declared that conditions for determining the content falling under this law will create a thing like the "
great Chinese firewall". They further claimed that existing Russian legal practice demonstrates a high likelihood of a worst-case scenario, resulting in a country-wide ban of Wikipedia. The second and the third readings of the law were held in the
State Duma on 11 July; no essential corrections were introduced. The law will come into force after three readings in the State Duma, one reading in the Federation Council and presidential approval. On 10 July,
Nikolai Nikiforov,
Russian Minister for Telecommunications and Mass Media announced in his Twitter account, that the organization of the List of the prohibited websites (that was sited on the
Law Project No. 89417-6) will be suspended until 1 November 2012. On the same day
Yelena Mizulina, a Duma deputy and the head of the subcommittee which sponsored the law, said that the blackout is an attempt to blackmail the Duma and was sponsored by the "pedophile lobby". Since 2012,
Russian foreign agent law resulted in reduced funding available for the Russian Wikipedia and its volunteers, who no longer can receive financial aid from abroad, including their share of funds raised through global Wikipedia fundraisers. On 31 March 2013,
The New York Times reported that Russia was 'Selectively Blocking [the] Internet', though Wikipedia itself was not blocked at that time. Articles on Russian Wikipedia, and also on other Wikipedia versions, concerning the
shoot down of flight MH17 and the
2014 Russo-Ukrainian war in the Donbas region have been targeted by Internet propaganda outlets associated with the Putin-led
Russian government. The entire Russian Wikipedia was blocked in the Russian Federation for a few hours in August 2015 due to the contents of the article on
charas. In November 2019, Russian president
Vladimir Putin called for a government-run alternative to Wikipedia.
The Guardian reported state funds had already been allocated according to official documents published the previous September. The new electronic alternative was intended to be based on the
Great Russian Encyclopedia. According to the London
Times, the proposal had been abandoned by mid-May 2020, however, according to
Great Russian Encyclopedia employee Yekaterina Chukovskaya, only the working group was disbanded and work on the project as a whole will continue. In December 2023, the Russian
Wikimedia chapter voted unanimously to dissolve itself after its director had been warned by authorities that he would be designated a "foreign agent". He also stated that he was forced to resign from the university where he worked.
2022 fork In June 2022,
Runiversalis, a pro-government partial fork of the Russian Wikipedia, was launched. The site launched with only 9000 articles, a tiny subset of the 1.85 million articles on the Russian Wikipedia, with many articles being taken unmodified from the Russian Wikipedia.
Censorship and disinformation during the Russo-Ukrainian War In February and March 2022, in the first week following the
Russian invasion of Ukraine and breakout of the
Russo-Ukrainian War, Russian Wikipedia editors warned their readers and fellow editors of several, reiterated attempts by the
Putin-led
Russian government of
political censorship,
Internet propaganda,
disinformation attacks, and disruptive editing towards an article listing of
Russian military casualties as well as Ukrainian civilians and children due to the ongoing war. On 1 March 2022,
Roskomnadzor, the Russian agency for monitoring and censoring mass media, wrote to the
Wikimedia Foundation requesting for removal of the article "" ("
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine"). Russian courts have since levied multiple fines of 2 million rubles against the Wikimedia Foundation for refusing to delete alleged misinformation and articles about the war, such as on the
Russian occupation of Zaporizhzhia Oblast. On 11 March 2022, Belarusian political police
GUBOPiK arrested and
detained Mark Bernstein from Minsk, an editor of the Russian Wikipedia, who was contributing to the Wikipedia article about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. GUBOPiK accused him of the "spread of anti-Russian materials" and of violating Russian "fake news" laws. Calls to block access to Wikipedia have been made by various Russian political actors since the beginning of the invasion. In particular,
Valery Fadeyev and
Igor Ashmanov, members of the
Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, called on 4 April 2023 to block access because of "systemic bias".
2023 fork On 24 May 2023, Russian Wikipedia administrator, director, and accountant of
Wikimedia RU Vladimir Medeiko, announced the opening of the fork of the Russian Wikipedia — "Рувики" ("Ruviki"), he had secretly created and aimed at promoting pro-government Russian propaganda. On the same day, by unanimous vote of the general meeting of Wikimedia RU, he was stripped of all his posts and expelled from the organization. Longtime Russian Wikipedia administrator
Stanislav Kozlovsky, known as an active fighter against state censorship of the Internet and pressure on Wikipedia, was elected as the new director of
Wikimedia RU. Also on the same day, Medeiko was permanently blocked from the Russian Wikipedia. In June 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. permanently banned Medeiko from all wiki projects.
2024. State pressure on Wikimedia RU and its members On February 2, 2024, the Russian Ministry of Justice recognized the oldest active administrator of the Russian Wikipedia (since 2004), the founder and director of "
Wikimedia RU"
Stanislav Kozlovsky as a "
foreign agent" for publicly criticizing state censorship on the Internet, government attacks on Wikipedia, and the creation of quasi-state propaganda clones in the media Wikipedia. As a result, Kozlovsky lost his job at
Moscow State University, where he taught as an associate professor for over 20 years. He was banned from teaching and educational activities, deprived of the right to earn a living (all income goes into a "special account" from which he can only pay fines), and stripped of numerous other civil rights. Currently, he cannot even edit Wikipedia, as he is required to label all articles as a "foreign agent", which is against the project's rules. Kozlovsky could face criminal prosecution for any potential violation of his numerous duties as a "foreign agent". On March 18, 2024, the Russian Ministry of Justice added
Wikimedia RU to the
Register of Foreign Agents. The organization, which had supported Wikipedia in Russia for 17 years, was no longer allowed to operate and disbanded itself on February 26, 2025. == Impact of policies on content ==