The Russian language Wikipedia is blacked out today in response to a proposed law “on information”. The decision was taken by around 300 members of the Russian language Wikipedia community and is an independent action. The below text is taken from Wikimedia Russia’s blog (with some very minor amends). You can see the blog in the original Russian, alongside English, here.
Wikipedia in Russian will be closed on 10 July because of Russian parliament’s debating of amendments to the law about information (in Russian) that could create real censorship of the internet — a blacklisting and filtering of internet sites.
Supporters of the law’s proposition say that it is aimed only at widely prohibited content such as child pornography and “things like that”, but conditions for determining the content falls under this law will create a thing like the Great Firewall of China. The existing Russian law’s practice shows the high possibility of the worst scenario, in which access to Wikipedia soon will be closed in all country.