What sources does Russian Wikipedia use for articles related to the Russo-Ukrainian War
The European Union recently banned several Russian state-sponsored media because of propaganda. Several social media platforms followed suit to ban them too. Russia retaliated with a ban on several European outlets with state funding. This made me wonder: how is Russian language Wikipedia dealing with this? Are these banned domains often linked (referenced) in articles relevant to this war, or are they not linked at all?
This post is a work in progress and may be updated. Last update on the numbers/figures is from March 5, 2022.
Wikipedia has an extensive and open infrastructure, allowing you to actually ask and answer these questions. I did a basic analysis, and will share some preliminary answers (this post may well be updated). A few notes: I don’t speak Russian or Ukrainian, and this is therefore a merely basic quantitative analysis and my qualitative understanding is limited. It’s a single point in time, and does not consider a lot of nuances that come with maturing of articles (although it would be fascinating to look at the same over time). The categories I’m looking at, may include articles that are only tangentially relevant to the war (such as biographies), understanding this better requires more language skills than I have.
Because external links are primarily used for referencing sources, they are a useful proxy what articles are based upon. However, it should be noted that even unreliable websites may be linked to in justifiable ways (e.g. when these websites are the topic being described). Where possible, I will link to the articles about news sources on English Wikipedia, rather than the news source itself. For determining what domains have been banned, I based myself on what I could find, and I may update this going forward.
Methods: What I did, was basically take all articles in the category “Российско-украинская войн” in Russian language Wikipedia (ruwiki), collect all external links in those articles, looked at which domains were most popular, categorize them based on whether they were banned by the European Union, banned by Russia, or considered particularly bad sources by English Wikipedia. I define the EU-Russia ban ratio as the number of outgoing links to domains banned in the EU divided by the number of outgoing links to domains banned in Russia. This number is provided as an attempt to compare the number of links to these Russian state-sponsored media respective to another set of links that could be expected to be present in the same set of articles.
I then repeated this for sibling categories in Ukrainian language Wikipedia (ukwiki), English language Wikipedia (enwiki) and for another military conflict with Russia’s involvement.
Russian language Wikipedia
First things first, what are the most common domains linked to in this category of articles? There are at the time of writing 676 articles in this category, including 4 levels of subcategories. Jointly, they refer to over 24,000 external destinations (16,000 unique destinations). With some distance kommersant.ru (an important independent Russian business newspaper) is the most commonly linked domain. Other notable news sources in the top are Youtube (international video platform), RIA.ru (Russian state-owned news agency, closely connected to RT.com) RBC.ru (Russian daily financial newspaper), tass.ru (Russian state-owned news agency), lenta.ru (Russian popular online newspaper, considered a blacklisted source on enwiki), Novaya Gazeta (Russian critical online newspaper) and BBC (British state-owned but independent broadcaster). Due to subdomains, the exact order may be inaccurate. If you want to read more about the media landscape in Russia, try this article on English Wikipedia.
When we categorize these outgoing links by the categories ‘banned by EU’, ‘banned by Russia’ and ‘Bad Source Enwiki’, we find that there are 96 links to sources banned by the European Union (primarily RT and Sputnik), but 602 links to sources banned by Russia (in particular: BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Deutsche Welle) and 705 links to domains that are listed as ‘bad sources’ (blacklisted, deprecated or state-sponsored fake news mentioning Russia/Ukraine) on enwiki. There may be some overlap between categories. The EU-Russia ban ratio is 0.16: the Russia-banned domains are much more frequently linked from this category.
Ukrainian language Wikipedia
These numbers don’t necessarily mean much all by themself. It may be helpful to compare with the sibling categories Категорія:Російська збройна агресія проти України (з 2014) on ukwiki to get a contrast: in any situation, we would expect it to be very rare for this wiki to link to Russian state-sponsored websites.
In ukwiki, there are 11,667 articles in this category and its 4 levels of subcategories, with 182,000 links to 62,000 unique destinations.
Many of the top linked news sources are hosted on a Ukrainian government domain. When we compare the same categories, we see that this set of articles links 41 times to sources banned by the European Union, 1405 times to sources banned by Russia and 298 times to sources defined as ‘bad sources’ on enwiki. The EU-Russia ban ratio is 0.03: as could be expected in any case, EU-banned (Russian) resources are much less frequently linked from ukwiki.
English language Wikipedia
We could run the same numbers for enwiki. It should be noted that the EU-banned websites are already deprecated on enwiki by editorial policy since at least 2021, and therefore it would be unlikely thank links to these websites would be added.
This category (with 4 layers of subcategories) contains 615 articles, with over 48,000 external links to over 22,000 unique destinations. Most of the domains in the top of this list are what is typically considered as main stream Western media, but also here there is a very long tail.
No links point to domains banned by the European Union, and 3775 link to domains banned by Russia. 58 of the links are in our definition of a ‘bad source’ that we discussed above.
War in Syria
We have now briefly compared the numbers with sibling categories on ukwiki and enwiki, but it might also be interesting to go back in time a bit, and compare it with another major conflict where Russia was involved. This may give some perspective as towards how the attitude of the ruwiki community has changed with regards to these sources.
While it is impossible to find an adaquate analog for the Russo-Ukrainian War, I look at the Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war since 2015 (article on enwiki, category on ruwiki).
This category contains 240 articles, with 4800 outgoing links to 4100 unique destinations. While the order is different, the most-linked domains resemble the list from the Russo-Ukrainian War somewhat, although the explicit Russian military domains are more frequently linked. If we look at the categories, we observe that 43 of those links lead to the domains banned by the European Union and only 29 lead to domains banned by Russia. 175 lead to domains considered a ‘bad source’ on enwiki. The EU-Russia ban ratio is here 1.48, meaning that relatively speaking, the EU-banned Russian state-sponsored media are more prominent in this case. There are many contributing factors that could explain this (e.g. the amount of coverage of the war in Ukraine in these Russia-banned media may be bigger than of the war in Syria, it may be that the categories contain a different type of articles, or that the perceived level of propaganda has shifted), but I think it is fair to say that the Russian Wikipedia is making more extensive use of Western sources when describing the war in Ukraine than the war in Syria.
