Turkey, a pirate Wikipedia against censorship

8 september 2017

Wikipedia remains blocked in Turkey, but activists have created the pirate website www.turkcewikipedia.org to keep contents available. According to Turkish daily Hurriyet, it is a mirror website that has copied all Wikipedia contents in Turkish and English. The pirate website is said to be completely independent from the Wikimedia Foundation.

The Wiki articles made available by the pirate website include those that, last April, led the Turkish authorities to block the online enciclopedia in all its language versions. In particular, the Turkish authority for information and communication technologies (BTK) took this measure because of two articles (Foreign involvement in the Syrian Civil War and State-sponsored terrorism) stating that Turkey provides weapons to Jihad organisations in Syria.

The Ankara authorities declared that they will reverse the block of the enciclopedia, which counts around 40 million articles, when the contested sections are erased. On the other hand, the Wikipedia community refused to remove the pages and the Wikimedia Foundation appealed to the Turkish Constitutional Court last May.

Link: Hurriyet

This publication has been produced within the project European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, co-funded by the European Commission. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso and its partners and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Union. The project's page

PhD candidate at the University of Victoria (Canada), she holds an MA in Humanities from the University of Milan. Fazıla's research focuses on Turkey, populism, fundamental rights, media freedom and civil society in the European context. She has been working for OBCT since 2008.