Wikimedia RU

» see wikimedia.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A Wikimedia chapter is a small, strange kind of organization. It does not own the encyclopedia, cannot edit it with any special authority, and holds no power over what the volunteers in its country write. What it does is the unglamorous work around the edges: running photo contests, getting museums and archives to release their images, paying for someone's train ticket to a conference, and being the entity with a bank account and a legal address when the project needs one in that jurisdiction.

Wikimedia RU did that for Russian Wikipedia for fifteen years. The idea surfaced in 2005, serious preparation started in autumn 2007, and the Wikimedia Foundation's board approved the founding documents on 24 May 2008, the date the movement treats as its birthday. Russian law required every member of the partnership to be a Russian citizen. The legal registration finished on 21 November 2008, and the office ended up on Vozdvizhenka Street in Moscow, third floor, room 350.

It was good at the work and it was recognized for it, taking the Runet Prize in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2014. It ran a science photography contest with a television channel for years. In 2018 one of its people, Farhad Fatkullin, was named Wikimedian of the Year. None of that is why anybody outside Russia knows the name now.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the fork ~

Vladimir Medeyko co-founded the chapter and was its director into 2023. On 24 June 2023 he launched Ruwiki, a copy of Russian Wikipedia's text with its own editorial control, described by reporters as a state-friendly encyclopedia that had been edited to remove whatever reflected badly on the government. Its full public launch came on 15 January 2024. Bloomberg's read was that Ruwiki existed to be the version of Russian Wikipedia that stayed available inside Russia. So the chapter's own founding director spent the last months of its life building the thing being positioned to replace what the chapter had spent fifteen years supporting.

~ the vote ~

Stanislav Kozlovsky had been the other co-founder and was now the one left running it. On 18 December 2023 he was called to the dean's office at the Faculty of Psychology at Moscow State University, where he had worked for twenty-five years, and told there was reliable information that the Justice Ministry would name him a foreign agent that Friday. He was given two documents: a termination for absenteeism, or a resignation in his own hand. He signed the resignation.

The same day, the members of Wikimedia RU voted unanimously to dissolve the organization, specifically to protect everyone who had been associated with it over the years. Kozlovsky announced it on 19 December on the Russian Wikipedia forum: yesterday we decided to close Wikimedia.ru, we are preparing the documents for dissolution after fifteen years of work. He was careful to add that this did not mean Russian Wikipedia was going away, only that the authorities might decide to block it.

~ the register ~

The liquidation took more than a year of paperwork and finished on 26 February 2025. Along the way, on 22 March 2024, the Justice Ministry added Wikimedia RU to the register of foreign agents, which it did to an organization that had voted itself out of existence three months earlier and had no staff left and no bank account to restrict. The designation was aimed at a dead thing.

I have never once wondered who holds the bank account for the Wikipedia I read. That is the condition a chapter works in: if it is doing its job, nobody outside it learns the name. My own country took Wikipedia away for most of three years and gave it back by court order, and across all of that I could not have told you whether any organization existed here to argue about it. Wikimedia RU became legible to the rest of us on the day it voted to stop.

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