Putin plans to replace Wikipedia with ‘reliable’ Russian version

Open source website to be replaced by text based on Soviet Encyclopaedia

The Great Russian Encyclopaedia was considered by some to be a vanity project of Vladimir Putin (AP)

Vladimir Putin has proposed replacing Wikipedia with a more “reliable” Russian version as Moscow begins to take greater control of the state’s internet access.

Speaking in a meeting of the Russian Language Council at the Kremlin, Mr Putin said the crowdsourced information website with more than 611 million monthly users in the country should be replaced by a Russian text based on the encyclopaedia of the Soviet Union.

"Regarding Wikipedia ... It’s better to replace it with the new Great Russian Encyclopaedia in electronic form ... This will be, in any case, reliable information in a good modern form", he said, according to Russia’s RIA Novosti.

The Great Russian Encyclopaedia might just be the world’s last printed encyclopaedia – initiated by decree of Vladimir Putin in 2003 and finally published in 2017.

The 36-volume text, sold at just over £23 per volume, builds on the previous Soviet encyclopaedia – with critics warning many of the biographies contained within it bear a resemblance to official government talking points.

On its launch writer and critic Nikolai Podosokorsky told the Christian Science Monitor: “I'm not at all clear as to why we need this big encyclopaedia in the first place. I think it was one of those things decided in the early Putin era as a big prestige project.

"I've gone through several articles that pertain to my area of expertise, and found them quite superficial. The lists of references at the end were often extremely biased.”

But while the print edition was overtaken during its development, the Kremlin has since pledged to spend 1.7bn Rubles (£21 million) to move the text online.

Launched in 2001, the Russian language edition of Wikipedia features more than 1.5million articles, the largest collection of any Slavic language.

Over the course of its existence the website has been intermittently blocked by the Russian state – most recently in 2015 for references to marijuana.

In the past the Russian government has been among those to have edited the site’s articles – including edits to pages on the shooting down of flight MH370 and the 2014 Ukraine conflict to paint a more Moscow- friendly picture of events.

It comes as Moscow looks to move Russia closer to a Chinese system of online state censorship following the launch of its “sovereign internet” bill.

In theory the law offers the most wide-ranging restrictions ever seen on the Russian internet, including a system for filtering traffic and the potential to turn off all connections to the web in an “emergency”.

Proponents claim the measures are necessary to protect Russia from hostile attacks from abroad. Critics suggest it is an insurance policy for the government to stop dangerous ideas from spreading.

It follows legislation approved in March which proposed fining people up to 100,000 roubles (£1,241) for showing "blatant disrespect" for the authorities, Russian flag or constitution. Repeat offenders would face a prison sentence of up to 15 days.