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Pakistan Lifts Ban on Wikipedia

Pakistani Prime Minister has ordered Wikipedia to be restored after it was banned for blasphemous content

  • Publish date: Tuesday، 07 February 2023
Pakistan Lifts Ban on Wikipedia

Pakistan lifted the ban on online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, was lifted on February 6th upon the orders of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to "restore it with immediate effect".

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The decision to lift the ban came from the committee that the PM had formed to review PTA's decision. The committee included Minister for Law and Justice Azam Nazeer Tarar, Minister for Economic Affairs and Political Affairs Ayaz Sadiq, and Minister for Information and Broadcasting Marriyum Aurangzeb.

On February 1st, the PTA shared that they would be "degrading" Wikipedia services in Pakistan because the site contained "sacrilegious content", which Wikipedia had been asked to remove, but it did not comply, Pakistani News channel Geo News reported.

As a result, the site was banned completely in the country on February 3rd. On February 6th, the issue was brought forth to the PM who formed the three-ministerial committee to review PTA's decision. 

After review, the committee released a statement: "Wikipedia was a useful site/portal which supported the dissemination of knowledge and information for the general public, students and the academia. Blocking the site in its entirety was not a suitable measure to restrict access to some objectionable contents/sacrilegious matters on it. The unintended consequences of this blanket ban, therefore, outweigh its benefits."

Following this statement, the PM ordered Wikipedia to be restored with "immediate effect" in Pakistan and he formed a cabinet committee to further investigate the appropriateness of PTA's ban on the website.

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