On March 1, after a week of horrors in Ukraine, reports emerged that the office censorshipof Russia had threatened to block the Russian Wikipedia.
Alexander, 32, had a plan: to download a local copy of the Russian Wikipedia.
"I did it just in case", Reported before adding that he and his wife were "preparing to move to another country" with their two dogs, Prime and Shaggy.
Instagram has been blocked in Russia, but there are many who continue to access it using virtual private networks. On Monday, the Russian one government officially declared the Facebook and Instagram “extremist organizations.”
Alexander was not the only Russian citizen to download Wikipedia. The data show that after the threats of censorship, the Russians began to download the online encyclopedia en masse.
Russia is currently the country with the most Wikipedia downloads. Before the invasion, the country was not even in the top 10, but after February 24, Russia is firmly in first place.
The file of 29 gigabytes containing a Russian-language Wikipedia was downloaded 105.889 times in the first half of March, a figure that is more than 4.000 percent higher compared to the first half of January.
Recall that something similar happened in 2017 when Turkey blocked Wikipedia.
Wikipedia offers publicly to download its databases. The entire English Wikipedia is 87 GB with photos or 47 GB without. The Russian Wikipedia is even smaller, with 1,8 million articles compared to the 6,4 million English version.