Wikipedia is an open-source online encyclopedia with informative articles in 285 languages. The site is owned by the American non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation, but has self-governing communities of editors, writers and moderators in different language sections. In July, by the decision of such a community, the Russian section of Wikipedia was blocked for 24 hours.
On July 11, 2012, the State Duma of the Russian Federation passed the second and third readings of the bill providing for the compilation of a list of sites, access to which must be blocked by all Internet providers in the country. This method of protecting children from harmful information in Russian society has both supporters and opponents. It is quite natural that it is on the Internet, the administrative regulation of which the proposed legislative changes are aimed at, that its opponents are most active. One of the most notorious protests was the daily self-blocking of the Wikipedia section in Russian, which took place on July 10-11.
Technically, access blocking was implemented by including a Russian-language section in the pages of the insert in JavaScript. She redirected all requests to a page where the visitor, instead of the information he was looking for, saw a banner with the word "Wikipedia" blackened out by the abstract censor. Below it was the caption “Imagine a world without free knowledge” and an explanatory text with a link to the page where visitors were asked to go to express their solidarity. To disable this blocking, it was enough to turn off the execution of JavaScript scripts for the Wikipedia site in the browser settings, but the organizers of the action did not report this.
This is not the first protest of this kind on Wikipedia. On January 18, 2012, the English-language section of the storehouse of knowledge was blocked in a similar way. Thus, the site expressed disapproval of two bills discussed in the US Congress - the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). They were also aimed at regulating freedom of speech on the Internet. And on October 4, 2011, a section of Wikipedia in Italian went on strike - then a similar bill was read in the Italian parliament - DDL intercettazioni.
