Pakistan’s Prime Minister on February 6 ordered authorities to unblock Wikipedia, the federal government introduced, simply days after the web encyclopedia was restricted for “blasphemous content”.
Blasphemy is a delicate concern in Muslim-majority Pakistan, and social media giants Facebook and YouTube have beforehand been banned for publishing content material deemed sacrilegious.
Minister of Information and Broadcasting Marriyum Aurangzeb tweeted a replica of the order that said: “The Prime Minister is pleased to direct that the website (Wikipedia) may be restored with immediate effect.”
Last week, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) gave Wikipedia 48 hours to take away content material deemed “blasphemous”, earlier than it in the end blocked the web site.
An company spokesman had stated Saturday that Wikipedia would “remain blocked until they remove all the objectionable material”, with out specifying what content material was at concern.
According to the order printed Monday, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had instructed a committee made up of three authorities ministers to look at the PTA’s resolution to dam Wikipedia.
The committee discovered that the “unintended consequences of this blanket ban… outweigh its benefits”, the doc stated.
Another ministerial committee can be established to additional look at the difficulty, it stated.
The order was signed by the primer minister’s principal secretary, Syed Tauqir Shah.
The Wikimedia Foundation—the non-profit fund managing Wikipedia—stated in a press release over the weekend that the English model of the location receives greater than 50 million pageviews in Pakistan monthly.
Source: www.thehindu.com