MOSCOW, April 27. /TASS/. The magistrate court in Moscow has levied a fine against the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the Russian-language Wikipedia, in the amount of 2 million rubles ($24,527) for refusing to remove publication about the 40th engineer regiment of the Russian armed forces, a representative of Moscow’s magistrate court department No. 422 told TASS on Thursday.
"To find Wikimedia Foundation guilty under part 2 article 13.41 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation (failure of the owner of a website to delete information or a web-page in case the obligation to delete such information, such a web page, is included in the legislation of the Russian Federation) and impose a penalty on this entity in the form of a fine in the amount of 2,000,000 rubles," a court representative said.
The reason for this decision was the refusal of the administration of Wikipedia to remove the article about the above-mentioned regiment, since information about its whereabouts is prohibited.
Earlier, the Kalininsky court of Tyumen declared that information about the 40th engineer regiment of the Russian armed forces was prohibited from publication in the public domain. The prosecutor's office identified a Wikipedia article about this military unit and sent a request to the Russian media watchdog (Roskomnadzor) to take measures to remove the content. The regulator demanded that the Wikimedia Foundation remove this article, but this was not done, after which an administrative offense report was drawn up against the entity.
In April 2022, the court fined the Wikimedia Foundation 5 million rubles for refusing to remove articles about the events in Bucha, the destruction of the hospital and theater in Mariupol, and the manufacture of gunpowder; in February 2023, the organization was fined 2 million rubles ($61,355) for publishing data on the places of deployment three military units of the Russian Federation, in April - 1.5 million rubles ($18,406) for refusing to remove information about the battles for Akhtyrka in the Sumy region during the special miliary operation, 800,000 rubles ($9,819) for refusing to remove publication about the banned song of the Psychea group, and 2 million rubles ($24,540) for non-deletion of the article titled "Russian occupation of the Zaporozhye region". Last Tuesday, Wikipedia received another fine of 800,000 rubles for failing to remove false information about the activities of Tablighi Jamaat, an extremist group banned in Russia.
According to Roskomnadzor, banned materials remain on the Wikipedia portal, including false information about what was going on in the special military operation in Ukraine. In this regard, the Wikimedia Foundation will be tagged in search engines as a violator of Russian law. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a non-profit organization registered as a charitable foundation in the United States. The organization is known as a platform for Wikipedia and related projects.