The director of the Russian legal entity "Wikipedia" "WikiMedia" Vladimir Medeiko was fired, according to the Telegram channel "Wiki News". He was also expelled from the partnership and banned indefinitely from Wikipedia itself. The decision was made after Medeiko's colleagues learned that he secretly participated in the preparation of the Russian Wikipedia, which is subject to Russian censorship.
The fact that the possible dismissal of Medeiko is being discussed at a general meeting was previously reported to RTVI by Stanislav Kozlovsky, executive director of Wikimedia RU. He said that the news about the preparation of Ruvika came as a surprise to him.
“Anyone can make their own projects, this is not forbidden to anyone, anyone can take Wikipedia content and use it, this is completely normal. It is not normal to use the powers of the director of Wikimedia RU for this and to do this completely secretly for several years. In my opinion, this is not very beautiful, ”said Kozlovsky.
A representative of Wikimedia RU in an interview with Gazeta.ru said that another employee of the company was working on the Russian analogue of Wikipedia, but did not name him.
State Duma deputy Anton Gorelkin also wrote about the creation of the Russian analogue of Wikipedia in his Telegram channel. He said that Ruviki will be hosted on Russian servers and managed by a Russian legal entity, as well as fully comply with the laws of the Russian Federation.
“We argued a lot with Vladimir Medeiko, who was the head of the NP Wikimedia RU, and now moved to the chair of the ANO Ruviki Internet Encyclopedia… We have to evaluate how the Ruviki team will cope with cleaning up Wikipedia content from fakes and outright lies , and what sources will be used for this, ”the post says.
The Russian authorities have repeatedly had complaints about the content of Wikipedia. In particular, Roskomnadzor accused the encyclopedia of distributing child pornography and demanded that materials about Vladimir Putin be removed. After being accused of spreading "fakes" about the Russian army, Wikipedia was fined 2 million rubles.