Characterizing Knowledge Manipulation in a Russian Wikipedia Fork
It addresses the issue of knowledge manipulation in collaborative online encyclopedias for researchers and policymakers, offering a methodology applicable to other forks.
This paper tackles the problem of identifying knowledge manipulation in a Russian Wikipedia fork called Ruwiki by analyzing over 1.9M articles to characterize changes and classify manipulation topics, providing a numerical estimation of their scope.
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.