Turkey rejects Wikipedia's appeal

A Turkish court yesterday rejected an appeal by the Wikimedia Foundation against the nearly week-long blocking of access in Turkey to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, state media said.

The first magistrates court in Ankara threw out the appeal filed earlier this week by the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the domain name for Wikipedia, the state-run Anadolu news agency said.

The ban had been imposed on Saturday by Turkey's Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) and had remained in place after being backed up by a court order earlier this week.