Russia adds Wikisource to list of banned websites
Russia's Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications, Roskomnadzor, found a page with "extremist text" on Wikisource (the electronic library of the fund Wikimedia.ru), as reported in the fund’s press release. The publication in question is “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” According to Roskomnadzor,based on the decision of the Lenin District Court of Orenburg of July 26, 2010, the website was determined to have extremist content and has been included in the federal list of extremist resources. At the same time, despite the court’s decision and the page’s inclusion in list of extremist materials, the text is available on the Russian State Library website.
Because Wikisource has one IP address with the Russian segment of Wikipedia, and also uses HTTPS access protocol, it doesn’t allow one particular page of the service to be blocked. According to the head of the Wikimedia.ru fund, Stanislav Kozlovsky, all Russian-language Wikipedia pages may be affected because access to Wikisource will be blocked.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an antisemitic fabricated text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. Despite having been exposed as fraudulent in 1921, the text was widely used for propaganda purposes in Nazi Germany.