This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech. 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 is neither a regular Wikipedia editor nor a die-hard enthusiast, but he wants a source of information based on reliable and neutral sources, and independent of the Kremlin. He likes reading Wikipedia to learn about all sorts of topics—from the frivolous (Mozart and scatology) to the complex (geopolitics)—and he considers Wikipedia more trustworthy than the Russian media. After complaining about his crumbling life and disillusionment with his country, he was quick to share a note of sympathy for Ukraine: “I almost feel ashamed to discuss the struggles that we have in Russia these days.” 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 is the free encyclopedia that anyone can torrent.
via slate: Russians Are Racing to Download Wikipedia Before It Gets Banned
Von Version 1 by <a href=”https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nohat” class=”extiw” title=”meta:User:Nohat”>Nohat</a> (concept by <a href=”https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Paullusmagnus” class=”extiw” title=”meta:User:Paullusmagnus”>Paullusmagnus</a>); Wikimedia. – <a href=”//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-logo.svg” class=”mw-redirect” title=”File:Wikipedia-logo.svg”>File:Wikipedia-logo.svg</a> as of <a class=”external text” href=”https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/8/80/20100615232840!Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg”>14. Mai 2010T23:16:42</a>, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link