Thousands of volunteers worked on Russian Wikipedia last month, some at great personal risk. One of those volunteers, Pavel, said that it's become “one of the main sources of information for millions of people' due to strict media censorship.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is displayed on a massive screen on the side of a hotel on the outskirts of Moscow in April 2021. As media is shut down in the country, Wikipedia volunteers are filling an information gap.
Those efforts impress the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation, which supports volunteers around the world by maintaining Wikipedia servers, holding fundraisers and providing legal support.“The resilience of volunteer editors who continue to work throughout this ongoing crisis to ensure that Wikipedia remains a fact-based, dependable source of knowledge is remarkable,” the Foundation’s CEO, Maryana Iskander, said in a statement to The Examiner.
Wikipedia is created, edited, and maintained by volunteers around the world. While the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation supports the volunteers with grants and training, no one is paid to write or edit Wikipedia. The global community of Wikipedia volunteers gathers for events, including an annual conference, called Wikimania, and maintains a rich online culture of building informational resources with a neutral point of view and verifiable sources.
But for many Russian Wikipedians, the article on the Ukraine invasion is just one of 1.8 billion articles on Russian Wikipedia. Their mission is to treat all subjects with the same diligent and unbiased approach.