The decision by a small-town court in southern Russia to ban a Wikipedia page it said contained harmful information led to the entire online encyclopedia being briefly shut down for Internet users across the country.

The district court in the Astrakhan region had taken issue the Russian Wikipedia's entry on charas, an Indian form of hashish. The page apparently detailed the procedure for preparing the substance, which contains cannabis and is thus listed as an illegal drug under local law, RT explained.

Russian authorities ordered the page blocked, a move that briefly affected the entire website due to Wikipedia's secure https protocol. The ban was lifted on Tuesday, but the news still caused "a wave of panic" in the local online community, the Guardian reported.

Wikipedia and the Russian online watchdog Roskomnadzor, meanwhile, were at odds over why the prohibition was eventually repealed: Roskomnadzor said the information about charas had been redacted to comply with the court's instructions, while the encyclopedia claimed that the page in question remained exactly the same.

Andrei Soldatov, a journalist and author of "Red Web," a book about the Russian Internet, said the incident was significant because SORM -- the system Moscow uses for Web surveillance -- does not work with the more secure https protocol used by sites, such as Wikipedia, Facebook and Gmail.

"This is an important case because it's part of the general offensive against https. Roskomnadzor and the FSB [Russia's security services] don't know what to do with it," Soldatov said.

Vladimir Putin's government has increasingly tried to police the Internet ever since the president returned to power in 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald noted. Russia has passed legislation banning sites that contain child pornography, drug-related or militant material and sites that advocate suicide.

Wikipedia, too, has been in the crosshairs of Roskomnadzor before, the Washington Post noted, and a several dozen of its entries on drugs and suicide have been blacklisted since 2012.