A Russian court on Tuesday fined the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the electronic encyclopedia Wikipedia, 3 million rubles ($36,854) for failing to comply with a subpoena to remove an article about the Azov Battalion, Reuters reported.
Wikimedia did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment, but previously said the article complained about by Russian authorities was based on reliable sources and met Wikipedia’s standards.
At the beginning of August last year, the Supreme Court of Russia recognized the Azov battalion as a “terrorist” organization, but a month later its fighters in Russian captivity were handed over to Ukraine as part of a prisoner exchange.
Wikipedia is one of the few independent sources of information in Russia after the authorities unleashed a crackdown on the free press unprecedented since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Online news sources have also come under attack, with most Russian investigative websites moving their servers and headquarters outside of Russia to circumvent Kremlin-imposed censorship.
Russian authorities have so far said they have no plans to block Wikipedia, but have repeatedly fined the online encyclopedia.
Wikimedia called the fines part of “an ongoing effort by the Russian government to limit the spread of reliable information from good sources in the country.”
“We oppose such efforts and pressure tactics and view them as an attempt to use legal liability to limit access to free knowledge,” the foundation said.
The Russian “sovereign” Wikipedia is long overdue
Last week, Russia also fined the messaging app WhatsApp for the first time for failing to remove content banned in Russia. The TASS agency wrote on Tuesday that the Viber application, owned by the Rakuten Group, in turn risks being fined 4 million rubles due to the content that its users send to each other.
As for Wikipedia, almost all of the fines it has received in Russia are related to articles about the “special forces operation” that President Vladimir Putin launched last year.
In December, the Russian government announced that it would soon launch its own sovereign online encyclopedia to compete with Wikipedia.
“For now, this is the situation with Wikipedia: we mark it as a resource that violates the requirements [legislației ruse]but which is still available,” Russian Digitalization Minister Maksut Shadayev said on December 20 during the ministerial interview hour organized in the parliament in Moscow.
“After all, our main task is to have our own portal. We are creating a Knowledge Portal based on verified, updated materials of the Great Russian Encyclopedia. Now more than 100,000 articles have been prepared, they are updated by their authors, checked by experts,” the Russian minister added.
The “Knowledge Portal” was supposed to be launched earlier this year, but it is currently unclear what stage it is at.
Source: Hot News
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