You're reading: Wikipedia fears new complaints from Russia’s media watchdog in future

MOSCOW - The management of Wikipedia does not rule out issues with blocking of its articles in future, the Wikipedia.ru executive director Stanislav Kozlovsky told Interfax on Aug. 25.

“We cannot rule out the chance that in 10 minutes, we receive a fresh notification saying that one or 100 new articles have been included in the register,” Kozlovsky said when speaking to Interfax on Aug. 25.

Kozlovsky said that his organization had received a “notification confirming the removal of this article from the register [of banned information].”

Kozlovsky said: “They sent us a formal text distributed by a robot: ‘We are to inform you hereby on removal of the article from the register’. But on their site, they wrote something that was not quite clear, particularly, that Roskomnadzor [Russia’s media watchdog] eventually sent the article to the FSKN [Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service] where it was read. I am not sure what in particular was read down there, but the Roskomnadzor website said that the FSKN acknowledged [the article] and found nothing dangerous in it,” he said.

The article should have been sent to FSKN experts at once, Kozlovsky said. “The article was based on open sources, with all facts verified, [all sources were] not banned, including the UN website, scientific journals, monographs and the like.”

“We have received reports from Moscow and other regions, e.g. Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. I cannot be sure, maybe it is still blocked in some parts of the country. At least, the mobile Wikipedia version was not blocked. If someone has it blocked, all you have to do is to type m. in front of the Wikipedia address – everything is going to work. But, probably, host providers will stop blocking Wiki by the end of the day – I mean the ones who are blocking it now,” he said.

Roskomnadzor earlier distributed the order to the host providers to block a Russian Wikipedia webpage that, according to the state agency, contained some banned information.

It was a Wikipedia article containing information on the narcotic substance charas.

However, the blocking of one single Wikipedia webpage will eventually result in the entire website being blocked, Vladimir Medeiko, executive director of the Wikimedia.ru partnership, said.

On Aug. 25, Wikipedia was partly inaccessible and blocked.

The Roskomnadzor website later announced that the Wikipedia article that allegedly violated Russian laws had been edited and therefore removed from the unified register of banned information.

Koszlovsky confirmed that Roskomnadzor had removed the Wikipedia article about a narcotic substance from the register of banned websites.

In other words, the Russian Wikipedia website is now freely accessible.