Wikipedia Clones and Historical Consciousness in Russia’s Information War Against Ukraine: The Case of Ruviki»

Abstract

The article analyzes the role and mechanisms of functioning of the Russian project “Ruwiki” – a clone of the Russian-language section of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia – as a component of the hybrid and information war of the russian federation against Ukraine and the democratic world. The relevance of the study is determined by the growing influence of digital encyclopedic platforms and large language models on the formation of public perceptions, as well as by the active use by the russian federation of digital platforms to legitimize propaganda narratives and distort historical facts. The project “Ruwiki” is considered as an instrument of purposeful manipulation of users’ consciousness and control over the information space. The purpose of the study is a comprehensive analysis of the project “Ruwiki” as an instrument of information warfare, identification of mechanisms for manipulating encyclopedic content, and assessment of the role of artificial intelligence integration in shaping distorted historical information. The paper applies methods of comparative content analysis of Wikipedia and “Ruwiki” articles, data clustering methods to assess the impact of modified content on user traffic, as well as the case study method, in particular the analysis of the coverage of events of the Russian–Ukrainian war. As a result, it is established that “Ruwiki”, being a technical “fork” of Wikipedia, systematically distorts historical information, in particular regarding the Russian–Ukrainian war, replacing the terms “invasion” and “war crimes” with euphemistic formulations. Despite the fact that the changes affect only 1.75% of the articles, they generate more than 14% of views. The integration of Yandex GPT forms an “authoritarian filter” of knowledge, and the subsidy-based nature of the project confirms its state affiliation. It is concluded that “Ruwiki” functions as a closed information cocoon. To counter this threat, a strategy of active information defense is proposed.