[UPDATE: According to TIME magazine, after only a few hours, Russia has unbanned Wikipedia. TIME.com says: The communications agency lifted the ban on Russian language Wikipedia after saying the entry had been edited to comply with the court decision. But users noted that the entry for hashish had only adjusted its title.]
Russia announced Monday that it will be banning all of Wikipedia. Russia’s internet oversight agency has announced it’s plans to block all of Wikipedia due to ONE contested article about drugs.
According to DailyCaller.com:
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In the announcement, the government body said that if Wikipedia would not willingly block a Russian-language article about charas, a marijuana product, it would have no other choice than to block access to the entire web site in Russia. The agency is widely known by the Russian abbreviation Roskomnadzor.
The article previously included a description of how the cannabis product is made, which was deemed “illegal information” by Russian federal anti-drug police. In a similar move earlier this month, Russia briefly blocked Reddit over a discussion thread about how to grow hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Wikipedia does not take down individual articles except by user consensus. It uses the HTTPS security protocol, which means pages on its domain cannot be blocked individually. These two policies mean that Roskomnadzor will almost inevitably wind up blocking the entire encyclopedia.
