“Wikipedia” was fined 2 million rubles for not removing an article about the war

The judge of the peace in the Tagansky district of Moscow fined the American Wikimedia Foundation, which runs “Wikipedia”, two million rubles for refusing to remove articles about the war in Ukraine, which the Russian authorities consider to be fake. This is reported by “Mediazona”.

The fund was found guilty under the administrative article of non-removal of content prohibited in Russia. This is already the fifth fine for the Wikimedia Foundation for this article.

In April of last year, the court imposed a fine of five million rubles on the foundation due to publications about the murders of civilians in Buche near Kyiv, war crimes and the shelling of a hospital in Mariupol by the Russian army. Later, the court fined the fund another two million rubles after refusing to remove materials about the war in Ukraine. One of the articles talked about “estimation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022”.

At the end of February 2023, the reason for a fine of two million rubles was the refusal to remove information about three Russian military units from Wikipedia.

Roskomnadzor several times demanded that “Wikipedia” remove articles about the Russian invasion, including in English. The agency believes that “anti-Russian interpretation of events” is being promoted in Wikipedia articles.

Wikimedia previously stated that the information in the articles at issue in the court was obtained from reliable sources and complies with the standards of “Wikipedia”.