On April 29, 2017, Turkey cut off every language edition of Wikipedia. The nationwide block left China as the only other country that had shut the encyclopedia down entirely at the time.
The dispute started with a handful of articles. They alleged that the Turkish state backed militant groups, including the Islamic State and al-Qaeda fighters in Syria. Officials wanted those pages removed or rewritten. Wikipedia refused.
So the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, the body known as BTK, issued an administrative order under national security law. It came down on April 28, 2017, from the Ankara 1st Criminal Judgeship of Peace, and took effect across the country around 05:00 GMT the next day. The order did not name individual pages. It demanded wholesale changes, which Wikipedia’s parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, called a systemic form of censorship.
Traffic fell fast. Pageviews for the Turkish-language edition, which held more than 280,000 articles, dropped between February and May 2017. The block stayed in force for close to three years.
The end came from Turkey’s own courts. On December 26, 2019, the Constitutional Court ruled 10-6 that the ban was unconstitutional. It said the block breached freedom of expression under the Turkish constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights, and that narrower steps, such as removing only the offending pages, would have met the government’s concern without shutting down the rest of the site.
Six of the ten judges sided with that view, the newspaper Daily Sabah reported. The legal basis for such orders predates the ban: Law No. 5651, passed on May 4, 2007, lets authorities block content over national security and public order. By 2023, BTK had arranged the blocking of more than 400,000 URLs under those powers.
The Wikimedia Foundation had already gone to the European Court of Human Rights that May, arguing Ankara blocked the whole site because it refused to remove two articles, one on the Syrian war and one on state-sponsored terrorism. Access was finally restored on January 15, 2020, after more than two and a half years, without Wikipedia changing its editorial rules or accepting Turkish oversight.
Sources
- Block of Wikipedia in Turkey — Grokipedia
- Turkish Constitutional Court Rules Wikipedia Ban Violates Freedom Of Speech – Reports – UrduPoint
