for comparison, here are the book-wiki notes on ru-WP. Banning it in Russia has been considered for years. Think the Cold War ended in 1992? Not quite. Also note that we don't even mention the brutal Ukraine/Russian editwars here. That's ANOTHER textbook full of crap.
Thanks primarily to the slow penetration of broadband into Russia, the Russian Wikipedia is one of the few whose editing participation is still growing as of 2017, albeit slowly. Ru-WP is said to suffer from considerable nationalism and bias against other countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, according to many accounts. The ru-wiki articles dealing with Caucasus countries such as Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russian districts in the area, such as Chechnya and Dagestan, are said to be "extremely hostile and racist".
Per Radekz[12]: "One source of info for stuff going on Russian Wikipedia would be this (wikireality.ru). It's in Russian but if you slap individual articles into google translate you can get the jist of things. Of course this 'source' itself is pretty biased, it's basically a bit like ED-lite for people who care about Russian Wikipedia, it's where banned users go to attack (and I mean really attack not just criticize) others etc. So got to be careful. The stuff on the Russian Arbitration committee is interesting, and in particular the story of one of their Arbitrators (whose user name I forgot but will look up again) who had a rapid rise to power and as a result became the butt of many jokes on and off that Wiki."
On 10 July 2012, ru-WP was shut down as a protest against a new proposed law in the Duma, which would have severely censored websites. Press coverage:[13][14][15][16] WPocracy thread[17] The law passed, in spite of the Russian Wikipedia protest. One side-result was a very long thread on wikimedia-l, full of argumentation by English Wikipedia and WMF personnel, and no one from ru-WP. It degenerated into an argument over the SOPA blackout.
Ru-WP suffers from COI, paid editing, and editor abuse, just as the other Wikipedias do.[18][19]
A silly attempt to build another Russian online encyclopedia in November 2014 was widely reported in the media. [20][21][22] "Over the weekend, the Russian Presidential Library denounced the online database Wikipedia for being “unable to provide reliable and detailed information about Russian regions.” The library’s solution is to create a new web source that gives, in its opinion, more objective detail on life in Russia. This site is being dubbed an “alternative” to Wikipedia by the library. More than 50,000 books and documents from 27 regional libraries across Russia have been collected as resources for the website. "
As the political situation in Eastern Europe declined and the Russian government became more aggressive, the number of attempts to forcibly censor ru-WP became more frequent. An attempt to remove the "Heroin" article in late 2014 was reported. [23][24][25]
In January 2015, TASS and the Moscow Times reported this: "The deputy head of Russia's education watchdog said Thursday that Wikipedia should be banned, the TASS news agency reported. "Wikipedia does not help, but only harms education," TASS cited Alexander Biserov, deputy head of Rosobrnadzor, as saying. The official complained that the free online encyclopedia is riddled with factual errors, and concluded "I would ban it, I would simply censor it." A Rosobrnadzor spokesperson said later Thursday that the official's words were meant to be a joke and should not be taken seriously, Russian News Service reported. Wikipedia has previously changed the content of articles relating to drugs and suicide after they were blacklisted by Russia's media and communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor." The TASS article later disappeared.
Not surprisingly, Russian government people have edited ru-WP. For example: a 2017 media report claimed that "Like many high-ranking government officials, Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Federal Investigative Committee, has a verified account on the social media network Vkontakte, where photos from state ceremonies are shared, along with posts about various aspects of life as one of Russia’s top cops: meeting celebrities, attending important meetings, congratulating famous public figures on things, and celebrating different holidays. It’s all very official, but Meduza has learned that Alexander Bastrykin also has a surprisingly personal presence on social media, where Russia’s Investigative Committee chief composes poetry about love and about Alexey Navalny, posting as a Polish poet named Stanislav Strunevsky. Bastrykin also manages another unverified Vkontakte account in his own name, and he apparently closely edits his own Wikipedia page.". Also not surprisingly, Bastrykin's poetry is far from being "world class". [26] There is an article about him on English Wikipedia, which is not very flattering -- it mentions death threats and corruption. As of 2017 he was banned from traveling to the United States or having any financial transactions within the US.
See also: EEML/Digwuren battle