Russia's military invasion of Ukraine is entering its fourth week with no end in sight. The country has largely been cut off from the West due to the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whether it be through sanctions or boycotts.
The Kremlin has targeted one source of information.
People living in Russia have downloaded the entire Russian version of Wikipedia in order to access the offline version if they need to.
It seems like a tall task to download the entire encyclopedia. The process has been made easier by the organization that runs a free web browser for offline reading. The non-profit has compiled all the articles in the Russian-language version of Wikipedia into a torrent. In case you are wondering, the terms of the website allow this. The file is 29 gigabytes.
The number of downloads of the Russian-language Wikipedia have spiked in the last few weeks, according to a report by Annie Rauwerda for Slate. So far this month, it has been downloaded over 150,000 times. When compared to January of this year, the increase in downloads in March is more than 4,000 percent.
Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media threatened to block Wikipedia in the country earlier this month. The agency objected to the entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the internet encyclopedia, because it didn't follow the Kremlin's propaganda about the war.
Russia demanded that the free encyclopedia censor itself, but that was rejected by the free encyclopedia.
Many within Russia fear that the possibility of a ban on Wikipedia is real. Facebook and other social media platforms have been banned by Putin. It's easy to see that Wikipedia can be next. Russia has blocked other websites before.
Russian citizens have used many tools to resist being cut off from the outside world. It will be hard for Putin to continue to spread his own version of events with entries like the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Helping end the war is an important aspect.
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