Socio-Legal Discussion Group: A 'WikiLaw' Case Study: A Socio-Legal Approach to Ruwiki, Russia's Kremlin-Aligned Online Encyclopaedia

Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is commonly regarded as one of the primary sources of information worldwide. As a paradigmatic example of a self-governed and self-regulated platform, its ‘free’ nature – both in economic and content terms – has become increasingly unwelcome in authoritarian States, where governments actively seek to control information and shape public discourse through both legal and technological means.

A significant case study is the Russian Federation. Following the invasion of Ukraine, a stringent legal framework was implemented, aimed at suppressing what was deemed ‘foreign influence’ and ‘anti-Russian sentiment’. Legislative action has followed two interconnected trajectories. On one hand, pluralistic and transnational sources of information have been progressively delegitimised and portrayed as threats to national security. On the other hand, the Government has actively supported the development of a domestically controlled platform capable of reaching wide segments of the population, including users who have increasingly disengaged from traditional media.

These measures have directly affected Russian-language Wikipedia and Wikimedia Russia, the national chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. Editors contributing to articles related to politically sensitive topics face the risk of surveillance, prosecution, and incarceration. Simultaneously, an alternative, Kremlin-aligned platform was launched: Ruwiki (Рувики), conceived not merely as a counterpart encyclopaedia but also as an instrument of nationalist information campaigning. Its content was extracted from Russian Wikipedia, systematically omitting and rewriting all the elements deemed to be ‘Western misinformation’ through a mixture of human work and LLM supervision (via YandexGPT).

The research aims to understand whether the new legal framework is succeeding in shaping the Russian information sphere through the creation of a one-stop shop for Government propaganda, thus leading to a centralisation of disinformation. The final goal will be to assess Ruwiki’s potential social impact through an empirical and interdisciplinary methodology, combining a challenging socio-legal approach with possible mathematical reconstructions.