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eventVerified

Turkey blocks access to Wikipedia

Turkey blocked access to Wikipedia in April 2017. The restriction remained in place for more than two years before the Constitutional Court ruled on 26 December 2019 that the block violated freedom of expression. In the causal graph this event strengthens Digital Censorship, a driver that weakens Alternative sources of information index — a worsening welfare path.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Wikimedia Commons portrait; person avatar reused as fact cover, land-pack1 pattern).

Sources: [1][2]

Read the full account

Turkey blocked access to Wikipedia in April 2017. The restriction remained in place for more than two years before the Constitutional Court ruled on 26 December 2019 that the block violated freedom of expression. The Wikimedia Foundation, which had challenged the measure, described the decision as unconstitutional and later reported restoration of access. The dated fact stays anchored to the beginning of the nationwide block, while the later judgment supplies authoritative evidence about the rights impact of that restriction. A nationwide block differs from removal of a single unlawful page because it prevents users from reaching the entire reference platform, including material unrelated to the government’s original objections. The block therefore cut users off from a major information resource as a whole.

Who was responsible

Contribution type and responsibility level for each recorded actor — not sole-author shorthand.

  • Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

    Person

    Indirect / organizational responsibility

    Through Turkish Government

    verified

    Head of the executive and governing political system responsible for the measure. The cited institutional record documents the measure and its expression-rights mechanism under the government he led. Contribution size is permanently_blocked (no sourced fraction); provisional 0.4 is stored only because contributions.size is NOT NULL — not a sourced magnitude.

What changed

Fact → Driver → Indicator. Relationship strength orders the paths; it is not the observed indicator movement.

    1. FactTurkey blocks access to Wikipedia
    2. strengthensDriverDigital Censorship
    3. weakensIndicators (2)Alternative sources of information index
    Worsening path

    impact weight 0.64 · verified

    The measure directly affects the named condition of digital censorship; strengthening matches +1. Impact type and direction use the same sign convention. Weight basis: A blanket nationwide block of an entire reference platform for about two and a half years, later held by the Constitutional Court (26 December 2019) to violate freedom of expression. Weight 0.64 is the pack's qualitative severity class for this event, not an empirical coefficient.

Evidence

The sources behind this fact and its verification state.

Verified2 sources on file
  1. 1.Press release concerning the judgment finding a violation of the freedom of expression due to blocking of access to WikipediaConstitutional Court of Türkiye · verified
  2. 2.Turkish Constitutional Court rules that the two-and-a-half-year block of Wikipedia is unconstitutionalWikimedia Foundation · verified
What the sources establish

The record does not claim that Wikipedia content is uniformly reliable or that governments lack authority to contest unlawful material; the relevant mechanism is the blanket access restriction and the constitutional finding that followed it.

Causal path

How this event connects to drivers and indicators in the graph.

  1. ActorRecep Tayyip Erdoğan
  2. contributed toFactTurkey blocks access to Wikipedia
  3. strengthensDriverDigital Censorship
  4. weakensIndicatorAlternative sources of information index

Cite this page

Factrail. (2026). Turkey blocks access to Wikipedia. Factrail. https://factrail.ai/facts/tr-wikipedia-block-2017

https://factrail.ai/facts/tr-wikipedia-block-2017

Accessed 15 October 2026.

By the Factrail desk · Method: how we source and score · Last reviewed

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