The State Duma allowed blocking of Wikipedia

Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Anton Gorelkin allowed Wikipedia to be blocked because of an article about VPN services. He published a corresponding post on his Telegram channel.

Gorelkin was outraged by the article, which “not only describes ways to bypass blocking, but also strongly recommends using them.”

“There are legal grounds for blocking Wikipedia; all that remains is to ensure that this does not cause severe discomfort among users. In fact, all the valuable information that is available on this resource has already been duplicated, brought into compliance with encyclopedic standards and posted on the RuNet: on the portal “BRE”, “Ruviki” and “Runiversalis”. All that remains is to make sure that following a link to a Wikipedia article, the user is prompted to open its secure version on one of its Russian analogues,” Gorelkin wrote.

According to the deputy, the technical solution necessary for this is already being developed by experts from the Regional Public Center for Internet Technologies (ROCIT).

“The regulator [Roskomnadzor] still has a number of claims, many of which have already received court decisions,” Gorelkin added.

On March 1, a law banning advertising and popularization of block bypass services came into force in Russia. According to the document, Roskomnadzor will block not only instructions for installing VPN services, but also calls to use them. However, the law does not provide for liability for the use of such services.

Since 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the Russian-language Wikipedia, has been regularly fined for articles about the war in Ukraine. Roskomnadzor has repeatedly threatened to block the service and demanded the removal of texts entitled “Massacre in Bucha”, “War crimes during the Russian invasion of Ukraine”, “Shelling of a hospital in Mariupol” and others. Wikipedia does not meet these requirements.

Earlier, presidential aide and former Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky suggested copy-pasting Wikipedia for its Russian counterpart, the Knowledge.Wiki portal. He explained this by his reluctance to “produce entities.” According to Medinsky, Wikipedia “always comes up first” in search engines and contains 70 million articles in Russian, 99% of which are not only not harmful, but also neutral and interesting.

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