Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has directed the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to immediately restore the online encyclopaedia website Wikipedia across Pakistan, days after it was blocked for failing to remove “sacrilegious content”. “The prime minister has also constituted a cabinet committee on matters related to Wikipedia and other online content,” Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said in a statement on Monday. The PTA on Saturday blocked Wikipedia across the country for failing to block or remove “sacrilegious and blasphemous content”. On Wednesday, the PTA degraded Wikipedia for 48 hours with the instructions to block or remove the reported content. Wikipedia is a free, crowdsourced, and editable online encyclopaedia. It is commonly used as a starting point by millions across the world for basic information. On Friday, the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity that runs the website, issued a statement that read: “On February 1, we received a notification from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority stating ‘the services of Wikipedia have been degraded for 48 hours’ for failure to remove content deemed ‘unlawful’. As of February 3, our data shows this has extended into a full block.”