Wikipedia is not going to submit to the pressure of "weak and cowardly politicians"

The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, commented on the attempts of the Russian authorities to block certain pages of the encyclopedia, stating that Wikipedia will not submit to the pressure of weak and cowardly politicians. He also noted that blocking is always preferable to assignment to censors, they write Wikinews.

Earlier, on April 5, the Wikimedia RU Foundation received notice of the entry of the “Smoking Cannabis” article in the “Unified Register of Banned Sites”. Later it turned out that for half a year 15 pages of Wikipedia were added to the “Unified Register”, however Roskomnadzor did not notify the Wikimedia RU foundation or providers about this.

At the same time, the actions of the Russian authorities led to the Streisand effect - the attendance of an article on cannabis smoking increased dramatically and even those who had never been interested in this topic visited it:
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On April 8, a representative of Roskomnadzor told Interfax that Wikipedia cooperated and sent an acceptable version of the article. However, representatives of Wikipedia itself called it a lie and an attempt by the authorities to save face.

Jimmy Wales' full comment:

In my opinion, blocking is always preferable to assigning to censors. It is important to understand that the fear of full-scale locks of the project is based on the fact that some (presumably small) Internet providers who are unable for technical reasons to block the pages of certain articles will start blocking Wikipedia entirely, citing the laws of their country. Believe me, those providers who start blocking the site entirely, while others only certain pages, will lose customers very, very quickly. We are not weak - we are very strong. To submit to the pressure of weak and cowardly politicians — those who fear the spread of knowledge — is not the way of Wikipedia.