Russia has reportedly blocked the website due to local inaccuracies, and lifted it just hours after the decision.
In a Monday report on website IANS Live, Russian internet providers have begun blocking users from accessing Wikipedia as ordered by the country's federal watchdog service, a few days after new studies revealed Wikipedia inaccuracies.
A watchdog group called Roskomnadzor reportedly "sent an address of the page in the Russian Wikipedia that contained prohibited information on a narcotic drug."
"The attempts to move the article at a different URL that the executives of the Russian segment of the internet encyclopedia had made earlier did not limit the users' access to the content banned by court," a spokesman said in the report.
The report also noted users will have no access "to all the pages of the resource as a result."
But just a few hours after the decision on the ban, the agency has taken Wikipedia out of the list of banned websites Tuesday morning, Manorama Online reported.
The report said the page specified has been edited and complied with court rulings.
A few days ago, major Wikipedia inaccuracies were revealed in a study published in the Public Library of Science Journal One, as reported on Tech Times.
The research said entries on some science topics are "at risk of information sabotage on Wikipedia... which could be detrimental to scientific accuracy."
The research compared topics which are deemed "politically controversial" and topics of general interest such as the continental drift, general relativity theory and standard model in physics.
The controversial topics were found to have more views and more edits.
"Based on their findings, the researchers said that Wikipedia science edits should be monitored," Tech Times mentioned. "They also recommended that editors of these controversial pages need to have their reputations quantified and highlighted."
The relationship between this Russian blocking of the Wikipedia and the website's inaccuracies has not been confirmed in media reports.
