Apparently, Wikipedia is a threat to public order and national security

It’s easy to criticize Wikipedia for a lot of things. Besides being the source of many a plagiarized term paper, its crowd-sourced nature also means it’s occasionally subject to internecine warfare and political infighting over articles.

Wikipedia the largest general reference on the net

But now Turkey has blocked the self-described “largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,” under a vague law that allows the country to “block access to individual web pages or entire sites for the protection of public order, national security or the well being of the public,” according to The Guardian.

The New York Times said a statement published by the Anadolu Agency, Turkey’s state-owned news wire, justified the ban by claiming Wikipedia’s articles constituted a terrorism-related “smear campaign against Turkey in the international arena.” Apparently, Wikipedia had declined to remove content that the Turkish government considered “fabricated.”

And many news outlets noted that the Wikipedia action came on the heels of the Turkish leader’s narrow victory in a referendum giving him broad new powers, and it was accompanied by the firing of another 4,000 public servants, bringing the total to approximately 140,000 since the failed coup last July. 

Is Wikipedia the real issue? 

I get that there’s a lot at stake here, but, really, blocking all of Wikipedia? How are Turkish school kids going to do their homework? Who’s going to settle arguments in cafes? 

More important, Turkey’s action once again the highlights the inherent tension between increasingly nationalistic concerns of various countries around the world and the international reach and global perspective of many internet-based sites and services. 

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales posted on Twitter (which itself has been banned at various times in various countries) that “Access to information is a fundamental human right. Turkish people, I will always stand with you and fight for this right.” 

That Twitter thread quickly became a forum for an ongoing argument between people who thought the ban was justified and those who didn’t. 

Here’s the thing, though. Wikipedia, and by extension the internet as a whole, is uniquely valuable. Whether or not certain parts of it may be problematic—and I am not addressing that issue here—no one can question the utility of easy access to the giant trove of accumulated knowledge held in Wikipedia.

Blocking Wikipedia, or Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever site or service is in question, comes with a cost—in money, time, innovation and so on—to the people who lose access. And the more information and communication that gets blocked, the greater that cost. Those costs are real, even if they’re not always immediately visible or easy to measure.