Researching and writing this week’s column took me time and again to the fifth most popular website, Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia which started in 2001 with 3,848,878 articles in English. Wikipedia attracts 25 million visitors daily, according to ComScore.
“Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles (except in certain cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism),” explains the Wikipedia web page. To date, more than 82,000 volunteers have written for Wikipedia. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles for the Wikipedia encyclopedia.
And yet today, if I want to do any research using Wikipedia – that will be impossible. At midnight, eastern time, Wikipedia drew its shades for 24 hours as an electronic protest against anti-piracy bills before the United States Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate.
“It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web,” wrote Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation executive director, on the wikimediafoundation.org site.
Normally, like most folks just logging into the Internet or checking information on Wikipedia, I might not have known about the blackout until I tried to use it.
However, my son, Mark Hershberger, who works for Wikimedia searching and fixing glitches in their many free online resources, sent out a Facebook message alerting his friends and followers about the blackout.
Wikimedia made the decision over the weekend and Monday, although it was a holiday, the support staff volunteered to work to institute the temporary shutdown.
According to Mark, “By going dark, the editors of Wikipedia (not the foundation of Wikimedia) will demonstrate the impact of stepping into regulating the Internet. The many editors of Wikipedia will voice their concern for net neutrality with 24 hours of blocking accessibility to Wikipedia.”
“Oh, and just to clarify: it isn’t the Foundation that is doing the blackout. This was decided by the editors (people other sites call ‘active users’) of English Wikipedia. We’re helping them accomplish their goals, but much of the infrastructure is already in place so that they can achieve their goals.”
Piracy of music and movies is a major issue. However, the current legal solutions being considered have generated protests of more than 700,000 tweets and a million emails – enough that the San Diego City Beat reported there may no longer be the legislative will in the House to pass it, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, one of the bill’s most vocal opponents.
For today, though, Wikipedia and “an estimated 7,000 websites are planning to go dark Wednesday as part of a mass protest against a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills — and opponents of the measures say the number is likely to increase,” reported politico.com.
Mozilla will join the virtual protest.
Reddit will also hold a 12-hour blackout.
The popular Google, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr sites chose other means such as Google’s link explaining how these bills “are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet.”
The Wikipedia blackout and protest were not entered into lightly.
“Over 1,800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation,” Gardner wrote.
Gardner did not make the decision, the volunteer editors made it, “but I support it,” she wrote. “We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone. We hope you’ll agree with us, and will do what you can to make your own voice heard.”
(Just doing her part, Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)