Censorship of Wikipedia
Wikipedia has been censored by governments in countries including (but not limited to) China, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela.
However, some governments and companies have installed mass surveillance spyware applications on user equipment, which may detect the usage of VPN software and record visited URLs.
Legal code may deter people from accessing the sites due to the threat of fines, imprisonment, loss of job, or physical harm.
[11] Wikipedia received positive coverage in China's state press in early 2004 but was blocked on 3 June 2004, ahead of the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.
Wikipedia users Shi Zhao and Cui Wei wrote letters to technicians and authorities in an attempt to convince them to unblock the website.
[17] Lih confirmed the full unblocking several days later and offered a partial analysis of the effects based on the rate of new account creation on the Chinese Wikipedia.
In the four days after the unblocking, the rate of new registrations more than tripled to over 1,200 daily, making it the second fastest growing Wikipedia after the English version.
[32] Since June 2015, all Wikipedias redirect HTTP requests to the corresponding HTTPS addresses, thereby making encryption mandatory for all users and rendering the site inaccessible in China.
Wales said he would fly to China to lobby the Chinese government to unlock the site within two weeks at the Leadership Energy Summit Asia 2015 in Kuala Lumpur on 2 December 2015.
[36] Wales met Lu Wei, the director of Cyberspace Administration of China on 17 December 2015 during the World Internet Conference held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang.
"[37] Still, Wales' own words have been censored; he said that the improvements in machine translation might make it "no longer possible" for authorities to control flows of information in the future during a panel discussion.
[42][43][44] On 5 October 2021, the Chinese government rejected the Wikimedia Foundation's bid for observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization again for the same reason as in 2020.
[48][49] In a November 2013 report published by the Center for Global Communication Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, researchers Collin Anderson and Nima Nazeri scanned 800,000 Persian-language Wikipedia articles and found that the Iranian government blocks 963 of these pages.
[50] According to the authors, "Censors repeatedly targeted Wikipedia pages about government rivals, minority religious beliefs, and criticisms of the state, officials, and the police.
[56] Internet access in North Korea is severely limited, requiring special permission and viewers of foreign media could face imprisonment or death.
[78] On 5 April 2013, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (better known as Roskomnadzor) confirmed that Wikipedia was blacklisted, stating that it had been "for a long time.
[80] Internet censorship became more common after a new law was passed around November 2013, allowing the government to block content deemed illegal or harmful to children.
[82] Roskomnadzor explained that "insofar as Wikipedia has decided to function on the basis of https, which doesn't allow restricting to individual pages on its site, the entire website would be blocked" if they did not comply.
Roskomnadzor explained that they had "been informed by the Federal Drug Control Service that sufficient edits were made that met the conditions of court order".
[109][110][failed verification] Bassel Khartabil (Arabic: باسل خرطبيل) was a contributor to a number of open-source projects including Wikipedia; his arrest in 2012 was likely connected to his online activity.
[111] Several organizations, including the Wikimedia Foundation, established the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship in his honor in 2017, for an initial period of three years.
In 2018, County Court of Victoria chief judge Peter Kidd placed a non-publication order on all of the evidence and the verdict in a trial of Australian Cardinal George Pell.
[127] In April 2013, a Wikipedia article describing the Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station attracted attention from the French interior intelligence agency DCRI.
[139] Following the incident, Télévision Loire 7 said that it expected that the DCRI would request that it take down the original 2004 report on which the Wikipedia article was based, though it had been filmed and broadcast with the full cooperation of the French armed forces.
[130] The National Union of Police Commissioners suggested that the next step would be for the judiciary to order French Internet service providers to block access to the Wikipedia article.
The organisation's spokesperson told Le Point that, "if the institution considers that secret defence information has been released, it has every opportunity to be recognised by the courts in arguing and clarifying its application.
The spokesperson noted that the information contained in the article had come from a documentary that had previously been filmed and distributed with the cooperation of the army, and that the hosts and intermediaries should not be held responsible.
The court order was a temporary injunction in a case filed by politician Lutz Heilmann over claims regarding his past involvement with the former German Democratic Republic's intelligence service Stasi.
[142] In December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based non-government organization, added the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer to its internet blacklist due to the album cover's image and the illegality of child pornography in that country; the image had been assessed by IWF as being the lowest level of legal concern: "erotic posing with no sexual activity".
Following discussion, representations by the Wikimedia Foundation,[146] and public complaints,[147] the IWF reversed their decision three days later, and confirmed that in future they would not block copies of the same image that were hosted overseas.
