Since yesterday evening, even the Italian Wikipedia users have known that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is underway. It took three weeks to decide. The page has finally been published. First there was a red dot that said it was in draft because there was an ongoing discussion on how to do it. I do not know the terms of the discussion, if the debate between editor of Wikipedia Italia has been on if and how to make an online encyclopedia during a conflict and therefore with the inevitable errors of real time; or if instead the confrontation was between those who call what is igniting it “invasion” and those who instead think like Putin, and therefore prefer to call it Military Operation “to denazify and liberate a country”.
Paper books last for centuries, digital doesn’t
by Riccardo Luna
What we do know is that in no other country in the world have the various versions of Wikipedia taken so long to take a stand. Not even in the Russian one where the debate, we talked about it here, on February 24, the day of the invasion, lasted a few hours, then it was decided to tell the facts and to report Putin’s statements explaining that they are not true. For having done so, the head of the Russian edition of Wikipedia Mark Bernstein was arrested a few days ago in Minsk, Belarus, and there has been no news of him since. Bernstein had courage and risks paying a very high price for it.
But there are times when that courage is needed. There are values that we cannot lose without losing ourselves. And there are people to whom all our gratitude cannot fail to go.