The voluntary blocking of users' access to the Russian section of Wikipedia was associated with a discussion of one of the bills in the State Duma. It involves the introduction of amendments to four existing laws aimed at limiting children's access to materials posted on the Internet that promote pornography, suicide and drugs. Opponents of the bill believed it could be used to censor the Internet.
The bill passed its first reading on July 6, 2012 and received a lot of criticism from both legislators and human rights defenders, and from potential technical executors. In particular, the Council under the President of the Russian Federation for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, the Minister of Communications and Mass Media, the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, and others expressed their disagreement with the proposed wording. The Russian section of Wikipedia also took part in the protest.
The sections of this media encyclopedia in different languages are independently managed. The self-blocking was initiated by several members of the Russian Wikipedia community, who had the technical rights to organize such a blocking. They created a poll in which almost three hundred registered members of the Russian Wikipedia community spoke in favor of the action and about a hundred were against it. The initiators violated a number of written rules and established traditions, but implemented their plans. The results of a four-hour blitz-poll, without preliminary discussion of what exactly should be done, were arbitrarily transformed by them into voting results. And the "will of the people" was embodied in the redirection of all visitors to a page with a banner, explanatory text and an offer to take part in the protest action. This action lasted for 24 hours on July 10-11.
Unlike a similar blocking of the English-language section in early 2012, visitors were not told how to disable the JavaScript banner, and they had no choice. The result of the action, in particular, was a demand submitted to the internal arbitration of Wikipedia to bring the initiators of the blocking and violators of the internal rules to justice. In the meantime, the second and third hearings of the bill were held in working order, the results of which, it seems, were satisfied with both its supporters and opponents. Even the irreconcilable opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky said that almost all amendments to the bill were taken into account, preventing its use to introduce Internet censorship. Of course, the action of the Russian section of Wikipedia was not a "Russian revolt" of the intensity described in "The Captain's Daughter". However, the features of "senseless and merciless" have been preserved in the protest actions of Russians since the Pushkin era - users of the online encyclopedia for a day became victims of censorship organized by fighters against it.
