This is the second time in the last six months that Wikipedia is threatened with complete blocking in Russia / E. Razumny / Vedomosti

On Monday, November 23, Roskomnadzor notified Wikipedia about adding the addresses of four pages of this resource to the register of prohibited sites; these pages contain articles about drugs. Wikipedia itself reported this on its official Twitter account. Roskomnadzor press secretary Vadim Ampelonsky confirmed this information to Vedomosti.

The pages can be added to the registry at the request of the Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN). The service considered that five Wikipedia articles about drugs (Cocaine, Methamphetamine, Amphetamines, GWH-018 and MDMA") violate the requirements of the law. The articles described the processes, instructions and schemes for developing psychoactive substances, Roskomnadzor said in a statement. However, in the end, only four articles may be blocked, Ampelonsky points out - in the article about GWH-018, Wikipedia users " have already made changes, the other four texts are also being actively discussed by users. According to the law, Wikipedia has three days to remove illegal information from the site after receiving the notification. "We very much hope that within three days all texts will be corrected in accordance with “legislation,” says Ampelonsky.

Otherwise, users will lose access not only to these four Wikipedia pages, but to the entire Internet resource. Most operators can block individual pages of sites, but since the encyclopedia uses the encrypted HTTPS protocol, the operator sees a continuous stream of data from this resource and cannot single out one page, Roskomnadzor warned earlier.

This is the second time in the last six months that Wikipedia has been threatened with complete blocking in Russia. In August, a district court in the Astrakhan region ruled an article about the drug charas illegal. At that time, Wikipedia took a principled position and refused to edit the text. The resource avoided blocking by rescheduling the disputed article on another page, and at the address indicated in the court decision, left only a list of designations of the word “charas” with links to the corresponding articles of the encyclopedia.

This time, they will not move information from articles to another address, Stanislav Kozlovsky, executive director of Wikimedia (the Russian division of the Wikimedia Foundation, which services Wikipedia), told Vedomosti. Users will try to make changes to articles themselves to avoid blocking, he says: “ If the community decides that some of the information in the articles is not illegal, it will not be removed, despite the threat of blocking the resource.”

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