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Russian police probe Wikipedia for extremism
Published: 18 October, 2010, 20:36
Edited: 24 October, 2010, 07:41
Moscow police have received a complaint saying that the international collaborative project Wikipedia contains extremist materials, and are currently working to check it.
I've seen some bizarre stories on here but this one beats the lot. I had to check it wasn't April 1st. What business is it of the "Russian police" if some Mussolini text is on a foreign website, or even for that matter, a Russian one?? For heaven's sake give up this control-freakery and paranoia and move forward. Or maybe the cat's out of the bag about Putin's divorce - oh damn sorry!!!
This report is not very specific, but the idea is correct. Wikipedia, being primarily an English speaking outlet, has accumulated a lot of junk and even outright harmful material. Lots of info is just plain untrue and even deliberately misleading and Wiki is often highjacked by groups that support a specific, narrow - and often hateful towards others - agenda. For example, some ultra nationalist Estonian organization would promote hatred towards Russia, or some Chechen terrorist organization would promote their terrorist attacks, etc. I'm sure that that's what is meant in the article as extremism. Unfortunately, articles in Wikipedia are not properly policed and credentials of those who write them are not checked (it appears they make attempts to do so lately, but without much success.) Therefore, anyone with enough free time and an agenda can write anything they please. A while back when I needed to do some research I was shocked at the poor quality of info there and stopped using it ever since. On the surface, the idea of Wiki is marvelous - a free and accessible to all global web encyclopedia. But in reality, the service is much too vulnerable to harmful and vicious elements in society and they use every advantage they can get in the absence of proper controls.
There is no such thing as extremism, it's an invention of corrupt and inefficient politicians whose sole purpose is to stamp out any dissent, primarily in their own country. It's true that the Russian police can't get at Wikipedia's servers, however they can order Russian ISP's to start blocking either the whole of wikipedia or some specific articles in Russia. They have in fact already done just that to www.kavkazcenter.com, now when people want to read about the Chechen militants' view on the events in Chechnya or elsewhere in Russia/the world, they have to use anonymous proxy servers, something that some people still don't know how to do. Still it's a shame. Larisa, both wikipedia and the rest of the internet is about raw information, it's about freedom of speech, I'm really saddened by the fact that there are still people in Russia, unfortunately, who seem to have simply no idea what freedom of speech is all about. You don't 'police' articles on websites like wikipedia - that's the whole point, free access to all points of view that exist, otherwise freedom of speech just goes down the chute, and that's unfortunately what's been happening in Russia over the past decade, now they're going after wikipedia
What is considered extremeism? Anything that the state does not approve of. Knowledge should be free.