Wikipedia is not going to obey the pressure of “weak and cowardly politicians”

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    Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales commented on attempts by the Russian authorities to block individual pages of the encyclopedia, saying that Wikipedia would not obey the pressure of weak and cowardly politicians. He also noted that blocking is always preferable to concessions to censors, Wikinews writes .

    Earlier, on April 5, the Wikimedia RU Foundation received a notice on the entry of the article “Cannabis Smoking” in the “Unified Register of Prohibited Sites”. Later it turned out that for six months the Wikipedia pages were entered into the Unified Register, but Roskomnadzor did not notify the Wikimedia RU Foundation or the providers about this.

    At the same time, the actions of the Russian authorities led to the “Streisand effect” - the attendance of an article on cannabis smoking increased sharply and was visited even by those who had never been interested in this topic:

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    on April 8, a representative of Roskomnadzor told Interfax that Wikipedia had agreed to send an acceptable wording articles. However, representatives of Wikipedia called it a lie and an attempt by the authorities to save face.

    Jimmy Wales full comment:

    In my opinion, blocking is always preferable to concession to censors. It is important to understand that the fear of full-scale blocking of the project is based on the fact that some (presumably small) Internet service providers that are unable for technical reasons to block the pages of certain articles will begin to block Wikipedia entirely, referring to the laws of their country. Believe me, those providers who start blocking the site as a whole, while others only certain pages, will lose customers very, very quickly. We are not weak - we are very strong. Obeying the pressure of weak and cowardly politicians - those who fear spreading knowledge - is not Wikipedia's way.

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