Russian President Vladimir Putin referred to the fact that the information on Wikipedia is not always adequately verified, there has been no talk of blocking the website, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.
"What the president and some other speakers meant was that, with all due respect, the information published and regularly updated in Wikipedia is not guaranteed by anyone. Nobody guarantees that it is correct and or credible. The president meant that we need to create a source of encyclopedic knowledge with guaranteed credibility accessible, and that would be the Great Russian Encyclopedia. There is no talk of any bans, any access restrictions for Wikipedia, and there can be no talk of anything like that," Peskov told reporters.
Earlier in September, it was reported that almost 1.7 billion rubles would be allocated for the creation of a Russian analogue of Wikipedia in 2020-2022. The Great Russian Encyclopedia publishing house is expected to receive the corresponding subsidy. This was mentioned in the appendix to the draft law: "On the federal budget for 2020 and the planning period 2021 and 2022".
