Wikipedia has been censored by a number of governments, including, but not limited to, those of Belarus, China, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Myanmar, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, the United Kingdom, Vietnam and Venezuela.
In some instances, there is widespread Internet censorship in general that includes Wikipedia content. Other measures prevent the viewing of specific content deemed offensive. Blocks are one of the tools that have been used to censor Wikipedia as well as targeting editors directly and making edits to articles themselves.
Governments were able to block access to individual articles until June 2015, when Wikipedia transitioned to HTTPS, forcing censors to choose whether to block the entire site.
Widespread censorship of Wikipedia
Types of censorship
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
Prior to June 2015, when Wikipedia fully transitioned from HTTP 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 were against the religious tradition of a regime (e.g. Iran). HTTPS made it much more difficult for governments to see which pages on Wikipedia a user was visiting. This forced censors to either unblock all articles or block the entire site.
Prosecuting editors
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 surveillance spyware applications on user equipment, which may detect the usage of VPN software and record visited URLs.
By country
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.
On 7 April 2022, a court in Brest sentenced Wikipedia user Pavel Pernikaŭ to two years of prison for three edits of Russian and Belarusian Wikipedia. He was found guilty of "discrediting the Republic of Belarus" (article 369-1 of the Criminal Code of Belarus).
China
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 "4 June, [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 2 December 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 6 December 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 was penalized by the local police in Zhoushan, Zhejiang, 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.