Minoritarianism
is most often applied disparagingly to processes in which a minority is
able to block legislative changes in the presence of supermajority threshold requirements. For example, if a two-thirds majority vote in favor is required to
enact a new law, an opposing minority of greater than one-third is said
to have "minoritarian" powers.
Even in the case where minority control is nominally limited to blocking the majority with veto power (whether as a result of a supermajority requirement or consensus decision-making),
this may result in the situation where the minority retains effective
control over the group's agenda and the nature of the proposals
submitted to the group, as the majority would be disinclined to propose
ideas that they know the minority would veto.
Critics of this use of minoritarianism argue that the
ability to block legislation is substantially different from the ability
to enact new legislation against the will of the majority, making the
analogy to unpopular "dominant minority rule" examples inappropriate.
Minoritarianism may also be used to describe some cases where appeasement of minorities by votebank politics is practiced. Examples include but are not limited to, Indian Muslims and Francophone Canadians.
In small deliberative groups
Supermajority
decision threshold requirements are often found in small deliberative
groups where these requirements are sometimes adopted in an attempt to
increase protection of varied interests within the group. The
requirements may be formally stated or may be unstated (for example,
when an organization is described as having a "consensus culture").
A common criticism of consensus decision-making
is that it can lead to a situation wherein a minority can block the
will of the majority. Consensus advocates argue that this is a good
feature—that no action is preferable to one without the consensus support of the group.
Attempts to resolve the dilemma through formal supermajority standards are generally discouraged by parliamentary authorities:
Some people have mistakenly assumed that the higher the
vote required to take an action, the greater the protection of the
members. Instead the opposite is true. Whenever a vote of more than a
majority is required to take an action, control is taken from the
majority and given to the minority. ... The higher the vote required,
the smaller the minority to which control passes.
—from "The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure" by Alice Sturgis
A dominant minority, also called elite dominance, is a minority group that wields political, economic, or cultural dominance in a country, despite representing only a subset of the overall population (a demographicminority). Dominant minorities are also known as alien elites if they are recent immigrants.
Christians in Sierra Leone are an example of minoritarianism. As of 2020, they make up 21% of its population compared to 78% Muslims.
The Tutsi in Rwanda from 1884 to 1959 exerted minoritarian rule over the Hutu population.
Rhodesia
From 1965 to 1980, the government of Rhodesia (later renamed Zimbabwe)
was controlled by a white minority. During this period, Black
Rhodesians faced institutional discrimination and had limited rights
compared to their White counterparts.
South Africa
South Africa was ruled by the apartheid regime from 1948 to 1994, wherein White South Africans (especially Afrikaners)
wielded predominant control of the country although they were never
more than 22% of the population. All non-white South Africans were
subject to segregation and discriminatory laws, resulting in disparities
in quality of life.
Liberia
In Liberia, African American-descended nationals
(known as Americo-Liberians) settled in Liberia during the 19th
century. Americo-Liberians were culturally disconnected from native
Liberians, preferring Western-style wear, American food, Protestantism,
and the English language. They formed an elite that ruled as a de facto one-party state under the True Whig Party (TWP). The 1980 Liberian coup d'état overthrew the TWP administration, ending Americo-Liberian minoritarian rule.
The Qing dynasty took power of China in 1644 and ruled until 1912; this dynasty was formed by Manchus. Han Chinese were forced to assimilate to Manchu customs under the policy of Tifayifu, which demanded the Han people wear Manchu-syle clothing, and adopt the queue hairstyle.
Taiwan
During the Kuomintang-led authoritarian rule of "White Terror" (1947–1987), Taiwan was ruled by the minority Waishengren, and the political rights of the majority Benshengren were restricted.
Pseudo-panspermia (sometimes called soft panspermia, molecular panspermia or quasi-panspermia) is a well-supported hypothesis for a stage in the origin of life. The theory first asserts that many of the small organic molecules used for life originated in space (for example, being incorporated in the solar nebula, from which the planets condensed). It continues that these organic molecules were distributed to planetary surfaces, where life then emerged on Earth and perhaps on other planets. Pseudo-panspermia differs from the fringe theory of panspermia, which asserts that life arrived on Earth from distant planets.
Some stages in the origin of life are well-understood, such as the habitable Earth and the abiotic synthesis of simple molecules, whether in space or on Earth. Later stages remain more speculative.
Theories of the origin of life have been recorded since the 5th century BC, when the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras proposed an initial version of panspermia: life arrived on earth from the heavens. In modern times, full panspermia has little support amongst mainstream scientists. Pseudo-panspermia, in which molecules are formed and transported through space is, however, well-supported.
Extraterrestrial creation of organic molecules
Interstellar
molecules are formed by chemical reactions within very sparse
interstellar or circumstellar clouds of dust and gas. Usually this
occurs when a molecule becomes ionised, often as the result of an interaction with cosmic rays.
This positively charged molecule then draws in a nearby reactant by
electrostatic attraction of the neutral molecule's electrons. Molecules
can also be generated by reactions between neutral atoms and molecules,
although this process is generally slower. The dust plays a critical role of shielding the molecules from the ionizing effect of ultraviolet radiation emitted by stars. The Murchison meteorite contains the organic molecules uracil and xanthine, which must therefore already have been present in the early Solar
System, where they could have played a role in the origin of life.[8]
Nitriles, key molecular precursors of the RNA World
scenario, are among the most abundant chemical families in the universe
and have been found in molecular clouds in the center of the Milky Way,
protostars of different masses, meteorites and comets, and also in the
atmosphere of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.
Evidence for the extraterrestrial creation of organic molecules
includes both their discovery in various contexts in space, and their
laboratory synthesis under extraterrestrial conditions:
Initial materials are CO, C, and NH3, common in molecular clouds of the interstellar medium
Planetary distribution of organic molecules
Organic
molecules can then be distributed to planets including Earth both when
the planets formed and later. If the materials from which planets formed
contained organic molecules, and were not destroyed by heat or other
processes, then these would be available for abiogenesis on those
planets.
Later distribution is by means of bodies such as comets and asteroids. These may fall to the planetary surface as meteorites, releasing any molecules they are carrying as they vaporise on impact or later as they erode.
Studies of rock and dust from asteroid Bennu delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx have revealed molecules that, on Earth, are key to life, as well as a history of saltwater.
Findings of organic molecules in meteorites include:
The system of racial segregation and oppression in South Africa known as apartheid was implemented and enforced by many acts and other laws. This legislation served to institutionalize racial discrimination and the dominance by white people over people of other races. While the bulk of this legislation was enacted after the election of the National Party
government in 1948, it was preceded by discriminatory legislation
enacted under earlier British and Afrikaner governments. Apartheid is
distinguished from segregation in other countries by the systematic way in which it was formalized in law.
Segregationist legislation before apartheid
Although apartheid as a comprehensive legislative project truly began
after the National Party came into power in 1948, many of these
statutes were preceded by the laws of the previous British and Afrikaner
administrations in South Africa's provinces. An early example is the Glen Grey Act, passed in 1894 in Cape Colony, and which had the effect of diminishing the land rights of Africans in scheduled areas.
List of apartheid segregation in South Africa
Population registration and segregation
The Population Registration Act, 1950,
required that every South African be classified into one of a number of
racial "population groups". This act provided the foundation upon which
the whole edifice of apartheid would be constructed.
The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, 1953
allowed public premises, vehicles and services to be segregated by
race, even if equal facilities were not made available to all races.
The Group Areas Act, 1950
(re-enacted in 1957 and 1966) divided urban areas into "group areas" in
which ownership and residence was restricted to certain population
groups.
The South Africa Act 1909,
which united the four South African colonies into a unitary state,
preserved electoral arrangements unchanged, meaning that qualified black
voters in the Cape Province could vote for the House of Assembly. This was an entrenched clause, protected by a provision requiring a two-thirds majority in a joint sitting of Parliament to alter the Cape Qualified Franchise.
The Representation of Natives Act, 1936,
passed with the necessary two-thirds majority, removed black voters in
the Cape from the common voters' roll and placed them on a separate
roll, allowing them to elect only three members to the House of
Assembly. The act also provided for four indirectly elected senators to
represent black people countrywide. Qualified coloured voters in the Cape remained on the common roll.
The Separate Representation of Voters Act, 1951
removed coloured voters in the Cape from the common voters' roll and
placed them on a separate roll, allowing them to elect only four members
to the House of Assembly. It was not, initially, passed with a
two-thirds majority, and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court invalidated it on this basis, precipitating the "coloured vote constitutional crisis". The government subsequently altered the method of election of the Senate and passed the South Africa Act Amendment Act, 1956 with a two-thirds majority, validating the Separate Representation of Voters Act.
The Native Administration Act, 1927
gave the executive government wide-ranging authority to govern the
"native reserves", and the people living in them, by proclamation.
The Bantu Authorities Act, 1951
established a hierarchy of tribal, regional and territorial
authorities, led by chiefs and appointed councillors, to govern the
reserves.
The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act, 1970
made black people citizens of one of the bantustans, with the intention
that when the bantustans became independent they would cease to be
South African citizens.
The Status of the Transkei Act, 1976
declared the Transkei to be an independent state and no longer part of
South Africa. This independence was not recognised by any country other
than South Africa.
When Wikipedia ran on the HTTP protocol, governments were able to block specific articles. However, in 2011, Wikipedia began also running on HTTPS, and in 2015, switched over to solely HTTPS. The switch has resulted in some countries dropping their bans and others expanding their bans to the entire site.
Blocking all Wikipedia sites (in one or every language)
Some
countries continue to block Wikipedia for long periods of time (e.g.
China). Other countries use widespread blocks for shorter periods of
time such as several months (e.g. Syria) to just hours (e.g. Pakistan).
Blocking specific articles
Before the switch to HTTPS,
some countries blocked articles on sensitive topics, such as ideas
espoused by a political opposition party, articles about current events
(e.g. Russia), or ideas that are against the religious tradition of a
regime (e.g. Iran). After the switch to HTTPS around 2016, it was no
longer possible to see which pages on a website a user was visiting, so
this type of blocking was no longer an option.
These prosecutions tend to focus on editors who publish information that a government wants to censor, leading to self-censorship.
Prosecuting readers
Few or no reports of government mass surveillance of Wikipedia usage are known since Wikipedia switched over to HTTPS in 2015. However, some governments and companies have installed mass surveillancespyware applications on user equipment, which may detect the usage of VPN software and record visited URLs.
2004, 2005–2008, 2015–present (https), April 2019–present (all)
All
All versions
Iran
2013–2015 (partial), 2023–present (Wikinews)
Partial
Hundreds of articles
North Korea
All
World Wide Web is physically disconnected
Myanmar
15 February 2021 – present
All
All versions
Pakistan
31 March 2006, several days in May 2010, 3 February 2023 – 6 February 2023
Some, all versions
Russia
2010s–present
Partial
Select pages
Saudi Arabia
2000s–present
Partial
Select pages
Syria
30 April 2008 – 13 February 2009
Arabic
Tunisia
23–27 November 2006
All versions
Turkey
2014–2015 (partial), April 2017–January 2020 (full)
All versions
Uzbekistan
2007, 2008, 2012
All versions
Venezuela
12–18 January 2019
All versions
Belarus
On 11 March 2022, Belarusian political police GUBOPiK arrested and detained Mark Bernstein, an editor of the Russian Wikipedia from Minsk, who was editing the Wikipedia article about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, accusing him of the "spread of anti-Russian materials" and of violating Russian "fake news" laws.
Access to Wikipedia has varied over the years with the Chinese
language version being controlled more tightly than other versions. As
of April 2019, all versions of Wikipedia are blocked in mainland China
under the Great Firewall.
The Chinese Wikipedia was launched in May 2001. Wikipedia received positive coverage in China's state press in early
2004 but was blocked on 3 June 2004, ahead of the 15th anniversary of
the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. Proposals to practice self-censorship in a bid to restore the site were rejected by the Chinese Wikipedia community. However, a story by the International Herald Tribune comparing entries on the Chinese and English Wikipedias on topics such as Mao Zedong and Taiwan concluded that the Chinese entries were "watered down and sanitized" of political controversy. On 22 June 2004, access to Wikipedia was restored without explanation. Wikipedia was blocked again for unknown reasons in September, but only for four days. Wikipedia was again blocked in China in October 2005. Wikipedia users
Shi Zhao and Cui Wei wrote letters to technicians and authorities in an
attempt to convince them to unblock the website. Part of the letter
read, "By blocking Wikipedia, we lose a chance to present China's voice
to the world, allowing evil cults, Taiwan independence forces and others... to present a distorted image of China."
In October 2006, The New York Times reported that the English Wikipedia was unblocked in China, although the Chinese Wikipedia remained blocked. New media researcher Andrew Lih blogged that he could not read the English-language article on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in China. Lih said that "There is no monolithically operating Great Firewall", noting that for users of various internet service providers in different locations in China—China Netcom in Beijing, China Telecom in Shanghai, and various providers in Anhui—the Chinese Wikipedia was blocked only in Anhui. Advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders praised Wikipedia's leaders for not self-censoring.
On 10 November 2006, Lih reported that the Chinese Wikipedia appeared to have been fully unblocked. Lih confirmed the full unblocking several days later and offered a
partial analysis of the effects based on the rate of new account
creation on the Chinese Wikipedia. Before the unblocking, 300–400 new
accounts were created daily. In the four days after the unblocking, the
rate of new registrations more than tripled to over 1,200 daily, making
it the second fastest growing Wikipedia after the English version.
Similarly, there were 75% more articles created in the week ending on 13
November than during the week before. On the same weekend that the
Chinese Wikipedia passed the 100,000 article mark, Lih predicted that
the second 100,000 would come quickly but that the existing body of
Chinese Wikipedia users would have their hands full teaching the new
users basic Wikipedia policies and norms.
On 16 November 2006, the Reuters
news agency reported the main page of the Chinese Wikipedia could be
displayed but not pages on some taboo political subjects, such as "4June, [1989 protests]". However, subsequent reports suggested that both the Chinese and English
versions had been reblocked the next day on 17 November. On 15 June 2007, access to non-political articles on the English Wikipedia was restored. On 6 September 2007, IDG News reported that the English Wikipedia was blocked again. On 2 April 2008, The Register reported that the blocks on the English and Chinese Wikipedias were lifted. This was confirmed by the BBC and came within the context of foreign journalists arriving in Beijing to report on the 2008 Summer Olympics and the International Olympic Committee's request for press freedom during the games. In September 2008, Jimmy Wales had a meeting with Cai Mingzhao, Vice Director of China's State Council Information Office.
While no agreements were made, Wales believed that a channel of
communication had been opened between Wikipedia's community and the government of China.
According to a report published in the American Economic Review
in 2011, the blocking of the Chinese Wikipedia not only reduced the
group size of its users but also decreased the unblocked users'
contributions by 42.8% on average.
In 2012, both the Chinese and English Wikipedias were accessible in China except for political articles. If a Chinese IP attempted to access or
search for a "sensitive" article, the IP would be blocked from visiting
Wikipedia for between several minutes to up to an hour.
Chinese authorities started blocking access to the secure (HTTPS) version of the site on 31 May 2013. Although the non-secure (HTTP) version was still available, it was vulnerable to keyword filtering allowing individual articles to be selectively blocked. GreatFire urged Wikipedia and users to circumvent the block by accessing other IP addresses owned by Wikipedia with HTTPS. In 2013, after Jimmy Wales stated that Wikipedia will not tolerate "5
seconds" of censorship, Shen Yi, an Internet researcher at Fudan University in Shanghai
said that while "Wikipedia is tough against the Chinese government, it
may not necessarily be so grand when faced with US government or
European justice systems' requirements to modify or delete articles or disclose information". Meanwhile, Huang, an administrator of Chinese Wikipedia, told Radio
Free Asia that he had already been exit banned (by the government) for 4
years since 2009 without a clear reason provided.
According to GreatFire, both the encrypted and unencrypted Chinese Wikipedia were blocked on 19 May 2015.
Since June 2015, all Wikipedias redirect HTTP requests to the
corresponding HTTPS addresses, thereby making encryption mandatory for
all users and rendering the site inaccessible in China. As a result,
Chinese censors cannot see which specific pages an individual is viewing
and therefore cannot block a specific subset of pages (such as Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaobo or Tiananmen Square) as they did previously.
Wales said he would fly to China to lobby the Chinese government
to unlock the site within two weeks at the Leadership Energy Summit Asia
2015 in Kuala Lumpur on 2December 2015. The government of China completely blocked all language versions of the site again on 4 December. A large number of Chinese internet users complained about the block on
social networks, although most of the complaints were deleted after a
short period. However, it became possible to visit Wikipedia in other languages on 6December in China again.
Wales met Lu Wei, the director of Cyberspace Administration of China on 17 December 2015 during the World Internet Conference held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang.
Wales said that this was the first time they met and there was no
consensus on specific issues but that the purpose of the meeting was for
the two to "meet and know each other". Wales told Lu Wei how Wikipedia
and Wikimedia work in the world and expressed hopes to meet Lu Wei and
the Cyberspace Administration of China regularly in the future. When a
reporter asked if he would order Wikipedia to hide some information to
maintain stable operations in China, he responded "Never." Still, Wales' own words have been censored; he said that the improvements in machine translation
might make it "no longer possible" for authorities to control flows of
information in the future during a panel discussion. However, in the
official translation, his statement was that such improvements will help
governments to better analyze online communications.
On 23 April 2019, all versions of Wikipedia were blocked in China.
On 23 September 2020, Wikimedia's application for the status as an official observer at the World Intellectual Property Organization
was rejected by the Chinese government because China's representative
claimed that they had "spotted a large amount of content and
disinformation in violation of [the] One China principle" on webpages affiliated with Wikimedia, and Wikimedia's Taiwan branch has been "carrying out political activities... which could undermine the state's sovereignty and territorial integrity".
On 24 October 2020, a Chinese citizen in Zhoushan, Zhejiang was penalized by the local police for "illegally visiting Wikipedia".
On 5 October 2021, the Chinese government rejected the Wikimedia
Foundation's bid for observer status at the World Intellectual Property
Organization again for the same reason as in 2020.
Despite being censored in mainland China, and as VPNs are
normally not allowed to edit Wikipedia, Wikipedia administrators from
China have permitted IP block exemptions for a select number of mainland
users. Such users are recruited to change the editorial content on
Wikipedia in support of the Chinese government's viewpoint and/or to
support the election of pro-Beijing administrators on Wikipedia, with
the aim of gaining control of Wikipedia. Academics suggested that "China
urgently needs to encourage and train Chinese netizens to become
Wikipedia platform opinion leaders and administrators ... [who] can
adhere to socialist values and form some core editorial teams." A group known as Wikimedians of Mainland China
(WMC or WMCUG) has clashed with Wikipedia editors from Taiwan, not only
over Wikipedia's content, but also making death threats made against
Taiwan's community of Wikipedians. One Taiwanese editor suggested that
it was not just patriotic mainlanders, but a "larger structural
coordinated strategy the government has to manipulate these platforms"
beside Wikipedia, such as Twitter and Facebook.
The WMC has threatened to report Wikipedia editors to Hong Kong’s national security police hotline over the disputed article "2019–2020 Hong Kong protests" characterized by edit warring. A Hong Kong-based editor, who remains anonymous because of fears of
intimidation, noted that "Pro-Beijing people often remove content that
is sympathetic to protests, such as tear gas being fired and images of
barricades. They also add their own content". Acknowledging that "edit
wars" happen on both sides, the anonymous editor stated that
"Pro-democracy editors tend to add content to shift the balance or the
tone of the article, but in my experience, the pro-Beijing editors are a
lot more aggressive in churning out disinformation. It's now unfixable
without external interference. Someone is trying to rewrite history."
On 13 September 2021, the Wikimedia Foundationbanned
seven Wikipedia users and removed administrator privileges from twelve
users who were members of the WMC. Maggie Dennis, the foundation's vice
present of community resilience and sustainability, said that there had
been a year-long investigation into "infiltration concerns" that
threatened the "very foundations of Wikipedia". Dennis observed that the
infiltrators had tried to promote "the aims of China, as interpreted
through whatever filters they may bring to bear". Suggesting possible
links to the Chinese Communist Party,
Dennis said "We needed to act based on credible information that some
members (not all) of that group [WMC] have harassed, intimidated, and
threatened other members of our community, including in some cases
physically harming others, in order to secure their own power and
subvert the collaborative nature of our projects".
In July 2024, Asian News Internationalsued Wikimedia
to uncover the identity of editors who characterized it on Wikipedia as
being a propaganda tool for the government, alleging the editors had defamed the news agency. The Delhi High Court threatened to block Wikipedia in India if the names of editors were not turned over.
On 21 October 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation suspended access to the article for the lawsuit itself—due to an order from the court stating that that article violated the sub judice principle. This is believed to be the first time an English Wikipedia page had been taken down after a court order.
On 17 March 2025, the Supreme Court of India questioned the Delhi High Court's order asking Wikipedia to remove details of the lawsuit. It also asked why the High Court was being "so touchy" about the issue.
It further noted that courts should not demand content removal merely
because it is critical of them. Supreme Court Justices Abhay S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan
noted that the case would have broad implications for press freedom.
"This concerns press freedom. If it is Wikipedia today, it could be
someone else tomorrow."
The Delhi High Court's order that the article be taken down was overturned on appeal to the Supreme Court of India.
The Court said that in a liberal democracy, judiciary and media must
support each other, and it is not the duty of the court to tell the
media to delete or takedown content.
In a November 2013 report published by the Center for Global Communication Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, researchers Collin Anderson and Nima Nazeri scanned 800,000 Persian-language Wikipedia articles and found that the Iranian government blocks 963 of these pages. According to the authors, "Censors repeatedly targeted Wikipedia pages
about government rivals, minority religious beliefs, and criticisms of
the state, officials, and the police. Just under half of the blocked
Wiki-pages are biographies, including pages about individuals the
authorities have allegedly detained or killed." Anderson said that Persian Wikipedia, as a microcosm of the Iranian
internet, is a "useful place to uncover the types of online content
forbidden and an excellent template to identify keyword blocking themes
and filtering rules that apply across the greater internet." In May 2014, according to Mashable, the Iranian government blocked at least two pages on the Persian Wikipedia. According to the Associated Press, during the COVID-19 pandemic, access to Wikipedia was disrupted in Iranian networks. As of 2023, Wikinews Farsi is blocked. XTools was blocked for months.
Myanmar
On 21 February 2021, following the military coup d'état, Myanmar blocked Wikipedia in all languages as part of the junta's censorship.
For seven hours on 31 March 2006, the entire domain of wikipedia.org
was blocked in Pakistan because one article contained information
pertaining to the controversial cartoons of Muhammad.
The English version of Wikipedia was blocked in Pakistan for several days in May 2010 during the controversy surrounding Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.
On 1 February 2023, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority
(PTA) degraded Wikipedia services for 48 hours due to what it said was
Wikipedia's failure to remove sacrilegious content. The PTA stated that
Wikipedia services would be blocked if the content remained available. On 3 February, Pakistani authorities blocked access to Wikipedia. On 6 February 2023, the Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif,
ordered the PTA to immediately remove the ban on Wikipedia. The reason
for lifting the ban was that "Wikipedia was a useful site/portal which
supported the dissemination of knowledge and information for the general
public, students and the academia". As of 15 June 2025, most parts of Wikipedia are accessible, with Wikimedia Commons currently inaccessible.
On 5 April 2013, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media
(better known as Roskomnadzor) confirmed that Wikipedia was
blacklisted, stating that it had been "for a long time. I don't know why
it's only now that they've woken up". The same day, Roskomnadzor ordered the Russian Wikipedia to remove the article "Курение каннабиса" ("Cannabis smoking"), or else they would block the entirety of Wikipedia in Russia. Internet censorship became more common after a new law was passed
around November 2013, allowing the government to block content deemed
illegal or harmful to children.
On 18 August 2015, Roskomnadzor instructed Russian Wikipedia administrators to remove the article "Чарас (наркотическое вещество)" ("Charas (narcotic substance)"), about charas,
a type of cannabis, by 21 August 2015 or else they would block
Wikipedia (which they executed to a limited extent on 25 August). The article was found by a Russian provincial court to contain a
detailed description of how to make a narcotic, deeming it prohibited
information. Roskomnadzor explained that "insofar as Wikipedia has decided to
function on the basis of https, which doesn't allow restricting to
individual pages on its site, the entire website would be blocked" if
they did not comply. In response to the impending block, the director of NP Wikimedia RU
Vladimir Medeyko argued that the article had already been promptly and
adequately rewritten to remove the controversial points and satisfy the
order, using scientific articles and UN documents, and also attempted to preserve the text by transferring it to the article "Гашиш"
("Hashish"). Wikipedia representatives said if access was restricted,
they would file a complaint to the prosecutor's office against
Roskomnadzor and appeal the decision. Anticipating the ban, the Russian Wikipedia published a resource titled "What to do if Wikipedia was blocked". On 24 August, Roskomnadzor instructed Russian internet providers to block Wikipedia. By the night of 25 August, around 10–20% of Russian users had issues
with accessing Wikipedia with access varying between regions and devices
used. Also on the same date, the charas article was removed from the registry
of banned sites. Roskomnadzor explained that they had "been informed by
the Federal Drug Control Service that sufficient edits were made that met the conditions of court order".
In February and March 2022, in the first week following the
Russian invasion of Ukraine and breakout of the Russo-Ukrainian War,
Russian Wikipedia editors warned their readers and fellow editors of
several, reiterated attempts by the Putin-led Russian government of political censorship, Internet propaganda, disinformationattacks, and disruptive editing towards an article listing of Russian military casualties as well as Ukrainian civilians and children due to the ongoing war. On 1 March 2022, Roskomnadzor threatened to block access to the Russian Wikipedia in Russia over the Russian-language article ru:Вторжение России на Украину (2022)
("Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022)"). Roskomnadzor claimed that the
article contains "illegally distributed information", including "reports
about numerous casualties among service personnel of the Russian
Federation and also the civilian population of Ukraine, including
children".
On 31 March 2022, Roskomnadzor threatened to fine Wikipedia up to 4million
rubles (about $49,000) if it did not delete information about the 2022
Russian invasion of Ukraine that is "misinforming" Russians.
In April–May 2022, the Russian authorities put several Wikipedia
articles on their list of forbidden sites. The list included the
articles 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ruscism, several articles in Russian Wikipedia devoted to the military action and war crimes during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and two sections of the Russian article about Vladimir Putin.
On 20 July 2022, due to the refusal of Wikipedia to remove the articles about the Russian-Ukrainian war, Roskomnadzor ordered search engines to mark Wikipedia as a violator of Russian laws.
On 1 November 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation was fined 2million rubles by a Russian court for not deleting two articles on Russian Wikipedia. On 13 April 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation was again fined by a Russian court.
In December 2023, Stanislav Kozlovsky, Wikimedia Russia's director, was listed as a "foreign agent" by the Justice Ministry of Russia. Moscow University, where he taught, expelled him. Wikimedia Russia was forced to disband.
In February 2024, Russian presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky
suggested that 99% of the articles on Wikipedia were "absolutely
neutral and even interesting", but 1% of articles were "enemy slander".
He also encouraged the idea of a native Russian online encyclopedia
alternative based on the content of Wikipedia.
On 11 July 2006, the Saudi government blocked access to Wikipedia and Google Translate for what it said was sexual and politically sensitive content. Google Translate was being used to bypass the filters on the blocked sites by translating them. Though Wikipedia is not blocked currently, specific pages on Wikipedia
were reported to be censored by Saudi Arabia in 2011, such as one page
discussing the theory of evolution. Encrypted connections over HTTPS made censorship more difficult for these pages and today there is no evidence that individual pages are still being blocked.
In September 2020, two Wikipedia volunteer administrators were arrested on the same day: Osama Khalid was sentenced to 32 years in prison while Ziyad al-Sofiani
was sentenced to eight years, according to Smex, a Lebanese NGO to
advance self-regulating information societies in the Arab-speaking
world, and Democracy for the Arab World Now. A subsequent investigation by the Wikimedia Foundation identified 16 users who seemed to routinely engage in conflict-of-interest editing—reportedly including spying for the Saudi government.
Access to the Arabic Wikipedia was blocked in Syria between 30 April 2008 and 13February 2009, although other language editions remained accessible.
Bassel Khartabil (Arabic: باسل خرطبيل)
was a contributor to a number of open-source projects including
Wikipedia; his arrest in 2012 was likely connected to his online
activity. He was executed at Adra Prison near Damascus in 2015. Several organizations, including the Wikimedia Foundation, established the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship in his honor in 2017, for an initial period of three years.
In the early hours of 29 April 2017, monitoring group Turkey Blocks identified loss of access to all language editions of Wikipedia throughout Turkey. The block came after Turkish authorities demanded Wikipedia "remove
content by writers supporting terror and of linking Turkey to terror
groups", a demand for which the government stated that it did not
receive a satisfactory response.
Starting on 17 November 2014, Turkey had only censored specific articles on Turkish Wikipedia, such as "2015 Türkiye genel seçim anketleri" ("2015 Turkey general election polls") and articles related to reproductive organs. There was no court decision for this censorship. One Turkish internet provider, TTNET, speculated that Wikipedia was broken. Katherine Maher from the Wikimedia Foundation said this did not reflect the truth.
In December 2019, the Constitutional Court of Turkey
ruled that the two and a half-year block was unconstitutional. On 15
January 2020, it was reported to the Wikimedia Foundation that access to
the website was being restored.
The entirety of Wikipedia was briefly blocked twice in Uzbekistan, in 2007 and 2008. Blocking of the Uzbek Wikipedia caught the attention of the international press in late February 2012. Internet users in Uzbekistan trying to access Uzbek-language pages were redirected to MSN. Users in Uzbekistan could easily open Wikipedia articles in other languages. Only Uzbek-language articles were blocked. Today, Uzbek users can access Uzbek-language articles without problems. In 2022, the Uzbek government co-hosted the WikiStipendiya article creation editathon with the Uzbek community.
Netblocks report of the developing incident of blocking of Wikipedia in Venezuela by CANTV as of 12 January 2019
In the evening of 12 January 2019, the NetBlocks internet observatory collected technical evidence of the blocking of all editions of Wikipedia in Venezuela. The restrictions were implemented by CANTV, the largest telecommunications provider in the country.
NetBlocks identified a major network disruption affecting
telecommunications infrastructure, which coincided with other
restrictions affecting Venezuelans' ability to communicate and access
information during the previous 24 hours. The collected data also showed
that a number of local websites had been recently restricted,
indicating that recent political instability could be the underlying cause for what may be a tightening regime of internet control.
Single-article disputes
Types of disputes
Individual
articles can be disputed or blocked by a country for allegedly
violating a range of laws from revealing the location of a secret
military installation (see France below), defamation or misinformation
laws (see Germany below), or a judgment that an image in an article was
pornographic (see UK below).
Examples by country
Australia
In 2018, County Court of Victoria chief judge Peter Kidd placed a non-publication order on all of the evidence and the verdict in a trial of Australian Cardinal George Pell.
The suppression order applied "in all Australian states and
territories" and "on any website or other electronic or broadcast format
accessible within Australia". This clearly included Wikipedia, which was cited but not charged.
Rémi Mathis, an administrator on the French Wikipedia, was ordered by the French interior intelligence agency to delete an article.
In April 2013, a Wikipedia article describing the Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station attracted attention from the French interior intelligence agency DCRI. The agency attempted to have the article about the facility removed from the French Wikipedia. The DCRI pressured Rémi Mathis, a volunteer administrator of the French Wikipedia and resident of France, into deleting the article. The Wikimedia Foundation asked the DCRI which parts of the article were
causing a problem, noting that the article closely reflected
information in a 2004 documentary made by Télévision Loire 7, a French local television station, which is freely available online. The DCRI refused to give these details, and repeated its demand for
deletion of the article. According to a statement issued by Wikimédia France on 6 April 2013:
The DCRI summoned a Wikipedia
volunteer in their offices on April 4th [2013]. This volunteer, which
was one of those having access to the tools that allow the deletion of
pages, was forced to delete the article while in the DCRI offices, on
the understanding that he would have been held in custody and prosecuted
if he did not comply. Under pressure, he had no other choice than to
delete the article, despite explaining to the DCRI this is not how
Wikipedia works. He warned the other sysops
that trying to undelete the article would engage their responsibility
before the law. This volunteer had no link with that article, having
never edited it and not even knowing of its existence before entering
the DCRI offices. He was chosen and summoned because he was easily
identifiable, given his regular promotional actions of Wikipedia and
Wikimedia projects in France.
Later, the article was restored by another Wikipedia contributor who lived outside France, in Switzerland. As a result of the controversy, the article became the most read page on the French Wikipedia, with over 120,000 page views during the weekend of 6–7 April 2013. It was translated into multiple other languages. The French newspaper 20 minutes, Ars Technica, and a posting on Slashdot, noted it as an example of the Streisand effect in action. The French Ministry of the Interior told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that it did not wish to comment on the incident.
According to a judicial source quoted in an AFP story on 8 April,
the article's deletion "was performed as part of a preliminary inquiry"
led by the "anti-terrorist section of the Paris prosecutor's office" on
the grounds that the French language Wikipedia article compromised
"classified material related to the chain of transmission for nuclear
launch orders".
Following the incident, Télévision Loire 7
said that it expected that the DCRI would request that it take down the
original 2004 report on which the Wikipedia article was based, though
it had been filmed and broadcast with the full cooperation of the French
armed forces. The National Union of Police Commissioners
suggested that the next step would be for the judiciary to order French
Internet service providers to block access to the Wikipedia article. However, the France-based NGO Reporters Without Borders criticised the DCRI's actions as "a bad precedent". The organisation's spokesperson told Le Point
that, "if the institution considers that secret defence information has
been released, it has every opportunity to be recognised by the courts
in arguing and clarifying its application. It is then up to the judge,
the protector of fundamental freedoms, to assess the reality and extent
of military secrecy." The spokesperson noted that the information
contained in the article had come from a documentary that had previously
been filmed and distributed with the cooperation of the army, and that
the hosts and intermediaries should not be held responsible.
Germany
In one case, Wikipedia.de (an Internet domain run by Wikimedia Deutschland)
was prohibited from pointing to the actual Wikipedia content. The court
order was a temporary injunction in a case filed by politician Lutz Heilmann over claims regarding his past involvement with the former German Democratic Republic's intelligence service Stasi.
Portugal
Following an August 2025 court order by the Portuguese Supreme Court of Justice, the English and Portuguese Wikipedia articles for businessman Caesar DePaço were partially censored to comply with said order.
Screen capture of the blocked article Virgin Killer
In December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based non-government organization, added the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer to its internet blacklist due to the album cover's image and the illegality of child pornography
in that country; the image had been assessed by IWF as being the lowest
level of legal concern: "erotic posing with no sexual activity". As a result, people using many major UK ISPs were blocked from viewing the entire article by the Cleanfeed system, and a large part of the UK was blocked from editing Wikipedia owing to
the means used by the IWF to block the image. Following discussion,
representations by the Wikimedia Foundation, and public complaints, the IWF reversed their decision three days later, and confirmed that in
future they would not block copies of the same image that were hosted
overseas.
