"Wikipedia" in Russia is planned to be replaced by the portal "Knowledge", said the head of the Ministry of Digital Development Maksut Shadayev. The portal will be officially launched early next year. A test version of the portal is already available, but unlike Wikipedia, to write articles on the portal, you need to fill out a questionnaire, indicating your full name, title, position, area of scientific interests, and so on.
The Ministry of Digital Transformation says it does not oppose a complete ban on the electronic encyclopedia, but the authorities intend to ensure that the Knowledge portal has priority over Wikipedia in search queries, RBC reports .
“Our main goal is to have our own portal – “Knowledge”, it has already prepared more than 100 thousand articles. It is planned that the portal will be launched in early 2023. We recommend it for use instead of "Wikipedia". Wikipedia is still available, but we will continue to ask that the Knowledge portal be a priority in search results,” the minister said.
This is the second attempt to replace Wikipedia in Russia. In August, the Runiversalis project was launched. On the main page , in particular, there is a block with articles about the war in Ukraine. On this site, the war is called only a "special operation", articles are devoted to the successes of the Russian military and their conquests in the territory occupied by Russia.
It also contains news from the propaganda media about the new holidays that Vladimir Putin is establishing, the start of the All-Russian Spartakiad and the new “naval doctrine” of the Russian Federation. The service runs on a wiki engine. Encyclopedia servers are located in Russia. According to State Duma deputy Anton Gorelkin, all attempts "to give articles a left-liberal and Western-centric bias will be suppressed."
The bill on the creation of a domestic analogue of Wikipedia was developed back in 2019, it was prepared by the Ministry of Communications. In 2016, Alexander Visly, then director of the National Library of Russia, said that this resource would become a domestic “rival to Wikipedia.” It was planned to allocate money for development from the state budget.
In April, Roskomnadzor sent a request to the Wikipedia administration to remove a number of materials related to the war in Ukraine. “The authors of articles posted on Wikipedia deliberately misinform users of the Internet resource with frankly false information. In the articles published on the resource, an exclusively anti-Russian interpretation of events is promoted, ”the demand says. It was not fulfilled.