KARACHI: The managers of Wikipedia have called on Pakistan to restore access to the online encyclopaedia in the country immediately after the government censored the popular site for not blocking or removing “sacrilegious content” within a 48-hour deadline.

The Wikimedia Found­ation, the group that oversees Wikipedia, said in a statement on Saturday that it “does not make decisions around what content is included on Wikipedia or how that content is maintained”.

It added that this was “by design to ensure that articles are the result of many people coming together to determine what information should be presented on the site, resulting in richer, more neutral articles”.

The Pakistan Tele­com­m­u­ni­cations Authority first degraded the services of Wikipedia, whose English version receives more than 50 million page views per month in Pakistan, on Wednesday. It then blocked the site on Friday after the government said Wiki­media failed to respond to repeated correspondence over the issue.

“We believe that access to knowledge is a human right,” Wikimedia said. “A block of Wikipedia in Pakistan denies the fifth most populous nation in the world access to the largest free knowledge repository. If it continues, it will also deprive everyone access to Pakistan’s history and culture.”

Published in Dawn, February 5th, 2023