The official launch of Ruwiki, the Russian version of the popular internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, will take place on Monday, according to Russian media reports.
Beta testing (a targeted test of the site) will begin in mid-2023, and the daily Kommersant reports that there are already more articles on Ruwiki than on the Russian part of Wikipedia.
Russia has said it has no plans yet to block Wikipedia, one of Russia's few surviving independent information sources since a state crackdown on online content intensified after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. .
However, Russian courts have since handed down a series of fines to online encyclopedias for content related to Ukraine.
According to Russian media, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a new alternative platform to Wikipedia in May 2022.
Last week, Izvestia newspaper quoted the Ruwiki news agency as saying that the most read articles in the beta testing phase included a list of the death toll in 2023, the escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Russia's military operation in Ukraine, the most It was reported that the report included articles with high profits. Russian movie.
Izvestia reports that the average user spends more than six minutes on the site, and during the trial phase, the average browsing depth was more than five pages.
Kommersant said Ruwiki's founders would not reveal how much the project cost or the names of the site's investors.
