The Russian government just banned Wikipedia

In an effort to resolve the impasse Russian Wikipedia editors are investigating ways of including additional information and citations to the offending article which meets the concerns of Roskomnadzor whilst maintaining Wikipedia’s commitment to free access to knowledge.

Internet service providers in Russia have been instructed to block Wikipedia after the Wikimedia Foundation refused a request from Russian authorities to amend an article that included instructions on how to prepare of a certain type of cannabis. Wikipedia’s policy of not removing individual articles could mean that Russia’s censors have no alternative but to block the site in its entirety.

Why block the whole of Wikipedia over a single article?

“Wikipedia uses a protected protocol, which does not allow providers… determine what pages the user is reading”, Medeiko told the Govorit Moskva radio.

There is a page on Wikipedia containing the list of things banned in Russian Federation .

The ban is due to a specific article about charas, a form of hashish that is handmade in India. “They preferred to communicate via statements on the internet instead”.

Reddit suffered the same fate in Russian Federation earlier this month after an article about hallucinogenic mushrooms attracted the ire of the government.

But Reddit is a private company, while Wikipedia is a non-profit that prides itself on free speech issues.

The entire ordeal between the user-generated site and Russian media watch dog Roskomnadzor began in a remote southern village called Chyorny Yar, where a prosecutor demanded that the Russian-language Wikipedia entry about charas be deleted from the web.

Roskomnadzor also blocked Reddit roughly two weeks ago over complaints that the site hosted information that described the cultivation of narcotics.