Mark Bernstein is 56 years old, lives in Minsk and is considered one of the top editors of the Russian language Wikipedia, an edition he has edited more than 200,000 times. The page on which Bernstein has worked most assiduously in recent weeks was the one that recounted, from the very beginning, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Released on February 24, at 4 am, it was initially called “Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine”. Two hours later, Putin gave his war speech. And the title changed: “Russian invasion of Ukraine”.
“It is a fact, not an opinion: Russian troops have invaded the territory of Ukraine,” Bernstein wrote on Wikipedia. But then his comment was deleted. And his account was blocked “indefinitely”. Mark Bernstein could no longer put his hand to that page: he was arrested by the Belarusian authorities on 11 March last. The story of the war, in the country that has long dreamed of getting rid of Wikipedia, has lost one of the most accredited voices.
The story of the Russian Wikipedia editor arrested and of which there is no further news
Bernstein’s colleagues in Europe and around the world did not stand by. There page dedicated to the invasion was written and published in Ukrainian, Belarusian, French, English and German. Even the Italian editors have produced their voice. But they chose not to publish itofficially for 19 days.
From February 25 – the date of its creation – to March 15 last, there was only a ‘draft’ of the page “Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022)”. In this period of time, on Wikipedia Italy the only testimony of Putin’s offensive was entrusted to a line of the page “Russian-Ukrainian crisis”, which tells the clash between the two nations since 2014.
A singular anomaly. For about three weeks the volunteers of Wikipedia Italy – they write and update the encyclopedia free of charge – have been fighting their little war. A “edit war”, An internal struggle made up of changes: on the one hand, those who wanted to publish the page immediately, to give an account of what was happening; on the other, who was against, because he claimed that the news was too fresh, difficult to verify.
On February 26th, at 7:32 pm, the user Albertostoria tried to transform the draft into a public page. In the section that contains all the changes of an entry, in chronological order, he wrote: “All the wikipedias of other languages now have a page dedicated to this war”. Two minutes later an administrator, Superspritz, moved everything back to the draft and wrote “Stop the recentism!”, Calling everyone to a long-term historical perspective.
Among the long-time users of Wikipedia Italy is Ruthven. He too is an administrator and enjoys the esteem and trust of the community. On March 2, he rejected yet another request from a user to publish the draft. “The rumor does not present an analysis of the long-term repercussions” he wrote, among other things, in the motivations. Ruthven is 49 years old, is a researcher and works in the field of robotic artificial intelligence. On the phone he specified that he wanted to remain anonymous: “I have been on Wikipedia since 2004 and on several occasions I have received death threats from other users.”
“If all the sheep jump out of the ravine, we don’t necessarily have to do it too,” said Ruthven about the draft of Wikipedia Italy on the invasion. “There are rules that cannot be touched, the so-called pillars. The first is that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and therefore offers an analysis of the facts: it is not just information thrown away, that’s why Wikinews are there. What kind of analysis can we do on an event that happened a few days ago? Also, what are the consequences of the invasion? We do not know, we cannot write ».
In the past, however, Wikipedia hasn’t been so cautious about dealing with news reports. On January 6, 2021, half an hour after Trump’s supporters raided the rooms of the US Congress, in Washington, the page that recounted the assault on the Capitol was published. In three hours, 1,800 words were written and published. And then the recent work on Covid: a huge amount of medical and scientific news has been scrutinized by expert Wikipedia editors, practically in real time.
Two Wikipedia
by Riccardo Luna
Even Wikipedia Italy, in some cases, published very quickly. Just think of the story of the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015: the series of attacks that took place late in the evening, in several areas of the French capital, produced an enormous flow of information, from more or less authoritative sources. Well, the page “Paris attacks of November 13, 2015” was created at 02:19 on November 14, a few hours after the roar heard at the Stade de France. Dozens of changes followed during the night and in the following days, providing a precise picture of the situation.
In the case of the invasion of Ukraine, however, the majority of the editors of Wikipedia Italy considered it inappropriate to publish a “minute by minute” breaking latest news of the conflict. With a grotesque result: Italian users have come across, for a long time, only the few lines on the invasion written in Sardinian (Russian invasion of s’Ukraine), Neapolitan (‘Russian Mmasione’ and ll’Ukraine) or Venetian (Invaxion rusa de la Ucràina of 2022). “I would have published only a few lines, as was done on the Neapolitan Wikipedia – said Ruthven – but many users did not agree on that either”. In short, the internal debate, apparently, has been heated. And it only happened with a deferred comparison on Wikipedia, through the “User Discussions” pages.
No assembly on Zoom, no WhatsApp group that could help a more effective comparison on an extremely delicate issue: how much to resist publication, fully claiming the role of secondary source but, at the same time, running the risk of appearing too cautious towards of a page with a high symbolic value. Or worse, to seem hostages of political likes or dislikes “that exist – admitted Ruthven – and that administrators must keep at bay with cold blood, for the good of the encyclopedia.”
“The fact is that Wikipedia does not publish the pages because they are symbolic – Maurizio Codogno, spokesperson for Wikimedia Italia told us -. Each edition has its own guidelines and the Italian one is particularly scrupulous ».
Two Wikipedia
by Riccardo Luna
«The page on the invasion is symbolic this month – said Ruthven detachedly – the next one will be another. It is certainly a historical event, but historians have not written about it ». The Wikipedia editor then explained to us how much the work of the Italian community is inspired by the Treccani encyclopedia, “which has great authority”. On Treccani’s website, much more information has been added to the entry “Ukraine” than what found space, in the three weeks following the beginning of the conflict, on Wikipedia Italy.
«The entries of an encyclopedia are not accordions in which the reader, tomorrow, may not find what is written today – told us Luigi Romani, digital manager of the Treccani Institute -. Only consolidated information should end up in the encyclopedia ». However, there are exceptional situations: «The periodic updating of the paper Treccani – told us Monica Trecca, manager of Treccani works – took place in 2020 in full pandemic, with the rumors about Covid written when everything was happening. It is a historical document ».
Wikipedia is the fourth most visited site in the world, with 5.97 billion monthly visits (Statista data, November 2021). Compared to encyclopedias such as Treccani or Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia has an even greater influence in the formation of knowledge and opinions, because the entries it contains are regularly at the top of Google searches. It is no coincidence that one of the longest and most heated “edit war” in the history of the online encyclopedia concerned the way in which the name of the capital of Ukraine is written on the platform: “Kyiv”, respecting the Ukrainian language, or “Kiev”, according to the Russian one.
In the end, the responsibility for publishing the Italian invasion page was taken over by a single administrator. “It was Jaqen, we make fun of him because he always wants to publish everything right away,” Ruthven said. The motivation reads: “Thanks to the intervention of numerous users, and to fruitful discussions, the problems that precluded the publication of the draft have been resolved”. A few hours before its publication, we asked Wikimedia Italia – which promotes Wikipedia in Italy but has no control over the editors – to be able to speak with some of the volunteers who were working on the draft, to ask for information on the curious gap in the Italian edition. “Simple coincidence,” said Ruthven, with whom we spoke that same evening.
And so, at 6:50 pm on March 15, 2022, the page “Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022”, although thinner than the pages of other European editions, finally appeared on Wikipedia Italy.