‘Pirate’ Wikipedia launched in Turkey after access ban

Ahmet Can - ISTANBUL

A “pirate” website for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been launched in Turkey, five months after the website was banned in the country.

With its domain name registered in the capital Ankara, the mirror website “www.turkcewikipedia.org” contains all the content of Wikipedia in both English and Turkish.

“Wikipedia provides an open-source environment. For that reason, all the content can be copied and used.

The ‘www.turkcewikipedia.org’ website is one of them. Mirror websites generally contains the exact same content available on Wikipedia. This website does not have any connection with the Wikimedia Foundation.

The foundation does not have any domain name other than wikipedia.org,” Wikipedia editors in Turkey told daily Hürriyet.

The new “pirate” website also contains the content on reportedly weapons-loaded Syria-bound intelligence agency trucks that led to its access ban in Turkey.

Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) stated on April 29 that it had blocked access to Wikipedia, citing a law allowing it to ban access to websites deemed obscene or a threat to national security.

The Ankara First Criminal Court of Peace later ordered the ban after Wikipedia’s administration refused to remove two of the site’s 40 million pages alleging that Ankara channeled support to jihadists in Syria.

Wikipedia applied to Turkey’s Constitutional Court on May 9 after its appeal against the ruling that blocked access to it was rejected by a local court.