Russians Are Racing To Download Wikipedia Before It Gets Banned (slate.com) 61
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Slate.com: On March 1, after a week of horror in Ukraine, reports came out that Russia's censorship office had threatened to block Russian Wikipedia. A 32-year-old who asked to be called Alexander soon made a plan to download a local copy of Russian-language Wikipedia to keep with him in eastern Russia. "I did it just in case," he told me over Instagram Messenger before sharing that he and his wife are "working on moving to another country" with their two dogs, Prime and Shaggy. (Instagram has been blocked in Russia, but many continue to access it using virtual private networks. On Monday, the Russian government officially declared Facebook and Instagram "extremist organizations.")
Alexander wasn't the only Russian citizen to make a local copy of Wikipedia. Data suggests that after the threats of censorship, Russians started torrenting Wikipedia in droves. Currently, Russia is the country with the most Wikipedia downloads—by a landslide. Before the invasion, it rarely broke the top 10, but after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, it has kept a solid hold on first place. The 29-gigabyte file that contains a downloadable Russian-language Wikipedia was downloaded a whopping 105,889 times during the first half of March, which is a more than 4,000 percent increase compared with the first half of January. According to Stephane Coillet-Matillon, who leads Kiwix, the organization that facilitates these downloads, Russian downloads now constitute 42 percent of all traffic on Kiwix servers, up from just 2 percent in 2021. "We had something similar back in 2017 when Turkey blocked Wikipedia," he said, "but this one is just another dimension." "Wikipedia routinely makes a dump of its databases available publicly, which Kiwix compresses into an archive so it can be more easily shared," adds Slate. "The entirety of English Wikipedia, from 'List of Informally Named Dinosaurs' to 'Floor' to 'Skunks as Pets' and everything in between, is 87 GB with pictures or 47 GB without. Russian-language Wikipedia is even smaller, continuing 1.8 million articles compared with English Wikipedia's 6.4 million."
Alexander wasn't the only Russian citizen to make a local copy of Wikipedia. Data suggests that after the threats of censorship, Russians started torrenting Wikipedia in droves. Currently, Russia is the country with the most Wikipedia downloads—by a landslide. Before the invasion, it rarely broke the top 10, but after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, it has kept a solid hold on first place. The 29-gigabyte file that contains a downloadable Russian-language Wikipedia was downloaded a whopping 105,889 times during the first half of March, which is a more than 4,000 percent increase compared with the first half of January. According to Stephane Coillet-Matillon, who leads Kiwix, the organization that facilitates these downloads, Russian downloads now constitute 42 percent of all traffic on Kiwix servers, up from just 2 percent in 2021. "We had something similar back in 2017 when Turkey blocked Wikipedia," he said, "but this one is just another dimension." "Wikipedia routinely makes a dump of its databases available publicly, which Kiwix compresses into an archive so it can be more easily shared," adds Slate. "The entirety of English Wikipedia, from 'List of Informally Named Dinosaurs' to 'Floor' to 'Skunks as Pets' and everything in between, is 87 GB with pictures or 47 GB without. Russian-language Wikipedia is even smaller, continuing 1.8 million articles compared with English Wikipedia's 6.4 million."
If a russian cares (Score:2)
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Easy for you to run off your mouth about moving to another country. Forty percent of Russian population is rural and has household income of $160 a month. You're like Peter Buttigieg telling USA poor people to avoid high gas prices by buying a Tesla.
They are (Score:2)
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A big reason why the pro war Russians are such a high percentage of the population is because more liberal pacifist minded folks tend to leave as soon as they can.
I always think what would it be like if 10 million liberal voters left the United States and all I can imagine is the right would finally have the Christian theocracy it's always wanted.
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Russia has a huge problem with brain drain. So much so that it's likely they are going to put a new iron curtain back up soon.
USA, EU and Britain just prevented it - by removing acceptance for all Russian education diplomas and certificates. So an educated Russian now has two choices (thanks to very thoughtful, well designed and ingenious sanctions) - to stay home and get a reasonably high middle class salary at home or to wash toilets in Germany, because his quantum physics diploma is worth less than toilet paper.
The Russian government has smiled, applauded the USA shooting itself in the dick and added a few tweaks for good mea
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Shouldn't have posted that bullshit, then. Handler will be very angry with you and will send to you bed without borsch.
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They followed after that in the interval 3-10th coordinated by the EU. There are statements by the German, French, etc ministries of education and so on. If you just googled you would have come across at least some of them.
No please go gently bugger yourself. With a Kremlin spire. You seem to a very Kremlin obsessed individual.
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...we have collectively decided to suspend all membership and accreditation activities with Russian institutions until further notice. For students, the accreditation designation remains valid, and business degrees that have been conferred under that accreditation status are recognized as being from an accredited school at this time...
And that's from a non-profit middleman that helps with accreditation.
Try harder. Earn your roubles!
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Everyone should (Score:2)
You never know if nuclear war will break out, Wikipedia would be invaluable then. Especially if we want to have a WW 4.
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Sounds like a perfect niche for the return of microfiche.
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creating a stack of paper somewhat over one mile high (5,605 feet)
It may be expensive, but just think how happy survivors of a nuclear war will be searching through hundreds of feet of paper containing Wikipedia articles on anime or popular TV series!
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creating a stack of paper somewhat over one mile high (5,605 feet)
It may be expensive, but just think how happy survivors of a nuclear war will be searching through hundreds of feet of paper containing Wikipedia articles on anime or popular TV series!
Plenty of toilet paper.
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No, convert it to a paginated, multi-part epub. (Sheesh, workable solutions are not that intractible.)
Who wants to leave a country (Score:2)
where Facebook and Instagram are banned? Surely they must have other reasons...
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The big loss for Zukerborg is not FB. It is Instagram. No more Russian t*ts and bottoms (barely covered to comply with Zukerborgian modesty requirements) to drive the revenue stream.
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Why would I want to look at FB sufficiently covered Russian bottoms? Are FB users that stupid?
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how many of us here are technically competent to find a way around the kind of measures that are being put in place to isolate a rogue superpower from the www?
Plenty of people have been plenty competent enough to work their way around idiotic limitations put in place by the corporate world for decades: anti-copy software, DVD CSS, content access limitations based on IP geolocation... All quickly and switly defeated by clever people who believe the old canard that information wants to be free.
State authorities are usually slower and stupider than companies. If the latter can be defeated soundly and regularly, there's no reason to believe the former will do any bet
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information wants to be nothing! (Score:2)
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...but didn't cover the novel 1984 by George Orwell...
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Weekly Download (Score:1)
Better hurry (Score:2)
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There is a flood of edits all over the place. Some are truthful and counter various Russian statements that fail closer scrutiny. Some are er... contentions. And some are outright disinformation. Ukraine had the largest army of "internet warriors" on the planet. Heard of Prigozhin trolls? They are a handful of boyscouts compared to 72, 74 and 102 CISPO units as well as various outfits which they contract to in the Baltic states, Poland, Bulgaria, etc.
With
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Did you just make up everything in your post?
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Let's review, comrades... (Score:2)
Sounds like some comrades are committing Thoughtcrime. Let's review:
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth." -- George Orwell, 1984.
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A good day for moderation points I'll won't get today.
Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
For all the complaints, what a great website. They've managed to stay free from sponsor manipulation, (you may complain about bias but) they do a really good job of information aggregation, and it isn't easy to manipulate. Despite all the doubters over the years, they've done a really good job.
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Yeah, that is silly, because an encyclopedia is a great resource to get started on a topic for further research (they're not citable as sources, but are great ways to start research from).
In fact, your teach should be encouraging students to critically think about Wikipedia - the fact
Kill the opressors (Score:2)
As I see it, a thinking Russian has two choices:
1. Get the fuck out.
2. Start killing the oppressors. Military leaders, police officers, and government officials are all fair game. It's open season for ethical psychopaths.
I'm hoping for #2.
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2. Start killing the oppressors. Military leaders, police officers, and government officials are all fair game. It's open season for ethical psychopaths.
Too bad, it was much easier to do, back in the Soviet days. There were actual positions specifically tasked to enforce Communist and government ideology. Now you have to kill anyone wearing a uniform, but you really should be killing the people who are wearing nice suits.
Russia is a bad place for good minds. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Is that why Americans are so bad at geography?
In Soviet Russia... (Score:2)
...Wikipedia... um... is disseminated among the masses?
Something's off... usually I don't laugh because it's not funny...
I look forward (Score:2)
..to a stone-age where people use USBs with the whole Wikipedia content as a decorative object to hang on their neck.
Honestly not a bad idea for anyone anywhere. (Score:1)
I even considered doing this here in the US when Wikipedia was quite new, because I figured it was only a matter of time before hosting costs shut it down. It has survived much longer than I thought was possible.
The unwritten headline (Score:2)
There is certainly a lot you can unwrap from this, but I wonder if perhaps this detail has been missed? ... With so many downloads taking place, can we not interpret this to mean that Russians are far more aware of the truth than most people -- including Putin -- give them credit for?
Putin has conducted some disturbingly effective misinformation campaigns in the past, both within Russia's borders and beyond, but perhaps it's an important historical note to recognize that his campaigns are falling entirely f
IPFS could save Wikipedia in Russia (Score:1)
Wikipedia has been distributed on IPFS. Here is a link: https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/
Again, no jokes? (Score:2)
It's enough to make me wish I was Woody Allen.
Oh, wait. Like Slashdot, he isn't funny anymore.