Turkish minister slams Wikipedia over Erdogan-authoritarianism link

After YouTube and Twitter, Wikipedia has become the latest website to come under the wrath of Turkish government with Culture and Tourism Minister Ömer Çelik lashing out at the Internet encyclopedia for mentioning President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in an article on authoritarianism.

The Wikipedia article states: "Authoritarianism and democracy are not fundamentally opposed to one another, it is thus definitely possible for democracies to possess strong authoritarian elements, for both feature a form of submission to authority. For instance, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister of Turkey, was elected three times, but shows strong authoritarian tendencies."

Erdogan on Wikipedia

Çelik took to twitter to express his disapproval of the Wikipedia entry.

“Mentioning Turkey alongside the [North] Korean regime and the [Abdel Fattah] el-Sisi regime in Egypt is just a kind of operation, not an intellectual analysis,” Çelik tweeted on Sunday, according to Hurriyet Daily News.

The minister added that encyclopedia’s editors had an “eclipse of reason.”

On Tuesday, the minister continued to criticize Wikipedia, saying that its “reliability has reached below zero.”

“When you conduct a study of mental archaeology on people who label Turkey as authoritarian [regime] on Wikipedia and its kind, you find such documents,” Çelik said, reportedly attaching a newspaper clip from 1960 in which the military coup at the time was described as a “coup for democracy.”