Draft:Runiversalis

Runiversalis (Руниверсалис, ), abbreviated as Runi (Руни, ), is a Russian online encyclopedia forked from the Russian Wikipedia, launched on June 9, 2022. Some sources explain its articles are written with a pronounced pro-Russian-government view of world events. Its creators claim to be former contributors to the Russian Wikipedia. Nevertheless, the Wikimedia Foundation has distanced itself from Runiversalis and its editors.

This site makes no mention of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, instead referring to it as a "special military operation".

Characteristics
Runiversalis' manifesto states that the project's servers are located in Russia, and the pages are edited "in accordance with the requirements of the legislation of the Russian Federation and with respect for traditional values." Runiversalis is based on MediaWiki, the software which also runs Wikipedia.

Runiversalis' administrator team includes two former Russian Wikipedia administrators, arbiters and mediators in articles about Ukrainian conflict, who were engaged in pro-Kremlin propaganda while they had positions on Wikipedia.

Since the end of August 2022, to make any edits in the encyclopedia, registration is required and must be confirmed by sysops. According to the Runiversalis project website, as of April 2023 it can be done by writing a message to their Telegram bot, to their VK page or sending them an e-mail.

Statistics
In August 2022, two months after the project has been created, it had only 9000 articles, a tiny subset of the 1.85 million articles on the Russian Wikipedia. Nevertheless, as of April 2023, Runiversalis has around 2 million articles, many of them being taken unmodified by bots from the Russian Wikipedia.

According to their own page, its milestones are as follows:


 * August 23, 2022: 9000 articles
 * September 11, 2022: 100,000 articles
 * October 23, 2022: 500,000 articles
 * November 26, 2022: 1,000,000 articles
 * February 3, 2023: 1,500,000 articles

Reception
On August 23, 2022, the media drew attention to the project when some Telegram channels, including those of State Duma deputy Anton Gorelkin, reported on the Russian Internet encyclopedia.

Cyber attacks
On 23 August 2022, the website stopped working due to a suspected DDoS attack, with readers getting a 403 error when they tried to navigate to a page on the site. The site returned a few days later.

As of 2023, Runiversalis remains in operation. As of 13 July 2023, it claimed to have over 2 million articles.