I’m sorry that you’ve run into this problem. Thanks for letting us know about it. I’m surprised that we’ve never had anyone encounter it before.
If you know of a similar platform that you can access, you could do the project with a different API. That said, I’ve just looked over at the map for the new curriculum and it seems like FCC is getting rid of the Wikipedia project. Maybe you’d like to skip the Wikipedia challenge and do those instead.
One of the reasons we built the freeCodeCamp Guide is because it’s apolitical and unlikely to get blocked in any countries. We’re building a new news platform that will cross-post our Medium and YouTube videos in ways that aren’t blocked either.
A lot of major websites - like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Medium - are blocked in lots of countries. We’re aware of this and working on work-arounds. Thanks for your patience!
As @ArielLeslie pointed out, the Wikipedia search challenge is no longer part of the beta.freecodecamp.org curriculum. None of the projects there are dependent on external APIs anymore, and this is one major reason for this design decision.
You can try VPN for accessing Wikipedia. I don’t think so Wikipedia should be banned in any country because it is the only source of learning and collecting information on various topics.
I guess any major information source can be viewed as a potential threat to regime in developing countries, if their political leaders can’t influence it directly. An article containing criticism of a government or its member can be enough to pull the trigger sometimes.
But Wikipedia is designed to not be biased. At least I thought it was. I suspect it is for other reasons. It’s sad that any government wants to control the internet but I can see why it happens. The internet is pretty wild place!
(PS. Personally I would not say that Turkey is a developing country.)
I am from Turkey too. I used a free VPN plugin for chrome to overcome this problem. You can also try Opera’s built-in free VPN. Also don’t panic when you get your certificate and see a broken page. Certificate’s background image is hosted on imgur which is also blocked in Turkey.
If anyone wonders why wiki is blocked in Turkey, the reason is a wikipedia page that blames Turkey for supporting terrorist groups in Syria.