Wikipedia is one of the world’s most visited websites and every internet users know its importance. It is students helping hand for homework, teachers valuable education tool, academics starting place for research and professionals resource for understanding their industries.
After all using Wikipedia is not that safe for some internet users. Did you know, in some part of the world like Turkey or Syria using Wikipedia is against the law. Yes, for example — Turkish government has blocked Wikipedia access from April 29, 2017.
So to access internet’s free encyclopedia anonymously and in a risk-free way, former Facebook security engineer Alec Muffett created a dark web Wikipedia service. This onion service for Wikipedia on Tor network gives visitors some strong privacy protections. And service is accessible only on Tor browser, which routes your network connection through several IPs around the world to hide your location from anybody trying to track you.
Since the normal version of Wikipedia is already available on Tor, but traffic becomes unencrypted because user’s traffic has to exit the private Tor network to initiate the connection with Wikipedia. Where, in Muffett’s onion service for Wikipedia, user’s traffic never leaves the safely encrypted confines of Tor, keeping it hidden.
However, onion service for Wikipedia is an unofficial project, for now, Wikipedia isn’t involved. And Wikipedia onion service is read-only, since Wikipedia blocks editing the site over Tor. Also, the service uses self-signed certificates that may trigger a security warning in Tor, so you have to manually white-list the addresses, which takes a couple minutes.
