Modeling Linguistic Imprints of War Propaganda in a Russian Wikipedia Fork: A Comparative Analysis with the Original Wikipedia
Year: 2026

Although Wikipedia aspires to provide neutral information, alternative versions can be used for political manipulation.This paper analyzes how narratives about the Russo-Ukrainian War are linguistically reframed in a Russian Wikipedia Fork compared to the original Russian Wikipedia.Using Kullback-Leibler Divergence on a corpus of war-related edits in more than 13,000 articles, we identify key differences between the two versions.While the original Wikipedia features Ukrainian references and admi