Refusing to comply with orders from state censors, Wikipedia will likely be banned in Russia

Wikipedia has refused to delete or restrict access to an article a Russian court has outlawed. The article in question—an encyclopedia entry about charas, a hashish form of cannabis—was banned in late June by a court in Astrakhan. Earlier today, officials from Roskomnadzor, the Kremlin's media watchdog agency, threatened to ban Wikipedia in its entirety, if the website refuses to remove access to the drug-related content.

"Wikipedia is a universal encyclopedia and all its information is gathered with citations linking to different sources. In this article [about charas], every bit of information is taken from the website of the United Nations. All links are to academic materials. We've discussed the situation, and we've decided to leave the article untouched," said Stanislav Kozlovsky, head of the Russian chapter of Wikimedia, the foundation that develops the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

“The purpose of Wikipedia is collecting knowledge and sharing it with people. If Roskomnadzor thinks people don't need knowledge...,” Kozlovsky told reporters [without finishing his sentence].

Earlier in August, Roskomnadzor briefly banned the popular website Reddit. The offending content was a page titled, "Minimal and Reliable Methods for Growing Psilocybe [Mushrooms]." Because Reddit uses https protocol for secure communication, many Russian Internet providers (perhaps 30 percent, according to Roskomnadzor) would have blocked the website in its entirety. It is unclear why Roskomnadzor, in its threat against Wikipedia, implies that Wikipedia's use of https would require the entire website to be blocked for more than 30 percent of Russian Internet users.