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arXiv:2504.10663cs.CL

Characterizing Knowledge Manipulation in a Russian Wikipedia Fork

Mykola Trokhymovych, Oleksandr Kosovan, Nathan Forrester, Pablo Aragón, Diego Saez-Trumper, Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Abstract

Wikipedia is powered by MediaWiki, a free and open-source software that is also the infrastructure for many other wiki-based online encyclopedias. These include the recently launched website Ruwiki, which has copied and modified the original Russian Wikipedia content to conform to Russian law. To identify practices and narratives that could be associated with different forms of knowledge manipulation, this article presents an in-depth analysis of this Russian Wikipedia fork. We propose a methodology to characterize the main changes with respect to the original version. The foundation of this study is a comprehensive comparative analysis of more than 1.9M articles from Russian Wikipedia and its fork. Using meta-information and geographical, temporal, categorical, and textual features, we explore the changes made by Ruwiki editors. Furthermore, we present a classification of the main topics of knowledge manipulation in this fork, including a numerical estimation of their scope. This research not only sheds light on significant changes within Ruwiki, but also provides a methodology that could be applied to analyze other Wikipedia forks and similar collaborative projects.

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Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.CLComputation and Language cs.AIArtificial Intelligence

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  1. Russia Poisons Wikipedia 2 comments
    • I think the article tried to refer to this link https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10663 As I understand from scanning the paper, the authors attempt to determine differences between the Russian wikipedia articles and the articles on the Russian fork. They show that articles on the fork…

      pet_the_birdView on HNParent context

    • To partly correct myself, among the many reports OP cites and reviews, it directly refers and links to the following: > In a report titled Characterizing Knowledge Manipulation in a Russian Wikipedia Fork, ... The OP describes and quotes the report for 5 paragraphs. I don't…

      mmoossView on HNParent context

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