Skip to main content

Wikipedia may blackout all articles to protest SOPA

wikipedia-logo-sopa
Image used with permission by copyright holder

In protest against the highly-controversial “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA), which will come up for a vote by the Senate’s House Judiciary Committee later this week, Wikipedia may blackout all of its English-language articles. The proposal was issued by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who argued in support of the idea on his personal Wikipedia user page after the Italian Wikipedia community achieved success with a similar protest. He has asked the online encyclopedia’s users and editors to say whether or not they support such a blackout.

“A few months ago, the Italian Wikipedia community made a decision to blank all of Italian Wikipedia for a short period in order to protest a law which would infringe on their editorial independence. The Italian Parliament backed down immediately. As Wikipedians may or may not be aware, a much worse law going under the misleading title of “Stop Online Piracy Act’ is working its way through Congress on a bit of a fast track,” wrote Wales. “…My own view is that a community strike was very powerful and successful in Italy and could be even more powerful in this case.”

SOPA would allow corporations (i.e. copyright holders) and the US government to block access to websites that are suspected of spreading pirated material, or facilitate such activity. Supporters of SOPA say that the legislation is needed to further fight online piracy and protect copyright holders from intellectual property theft. The opposition movement against SOPA — a faction that includes an increasing number of tech heavyweights, like Google, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, eBay, Yahoo and even Microsoft (among many others) — insist that SOPA is dangerous because it could usher in unprecedented online censorship, and potentially jeopardize the entire underlying structure of the Internet (the Domain Name System, or DNS), thus making it less secure.

The Wikipedia straw poll is currently ongoing, and well worth the read, as each voter is able to write why he or she supports or opposes the Wikipedia blackout. Self-described hacker Shishir Bashyal has created a pie chart, automatically updated every two minutes, which currently shows that 88.5 percent of respondents support (55.4 percent) or strongly support (30.1 percent) the community strike. Only 14.6 percent currently oppose (10.4 percent) or strongly oppose (4.2 percent) the blackout.

Wales says that this straw poll will simply be used to gauge opinion on the matter, but will not itself decide whether the blackout will happen. But “if this poll is firmly in ‘support’,” writes Wales, “we’d obviously go through a much longer process to get some kind of consensus around parameters, triggers, and timing.”

Andrew Couts
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…
WhatsApp now lets you send self-destructing voice messages
WhatsApp logo on a phone.

If you’re on WhatsApp and regularly make use of the view once feature for photo and video messages, then you might be interested to learn that the feature has now been expanded to voice messages.

WhatsApp’s view once feature does what it says, deleting a message after it’s been viewed a single time. It’s been available for photos and videos since 2021, but now you can also send voice messages that can only be played once before they, too, disappear from the app.

Read more
X rival Threads could be about to get millions of more users
Instagram Threads app.

Threads -- Meta’s rival to X, formerly Twitter -- has just launched in the European Union (EU), a market with nearly half a billion people.

The app launched in the U.S. to much fanfare in July, with Meta hoping to attract X users disillusioned with the turbulence on the platform since Elon Musk acquired it for $44 billion 14 months ago.

Read more
X (formerly Twitter) returns after global outage
A white X on a black background, which could be Twitter's new logo.

X, formerly known as Twitter, went down for about 90 minutes for users worldwide early on Thursday ET.

Anyone opening the social media app across all platforms was met with a blank timeline. On desktop, users saw a message that simply read, "Welcome to X," while on mobile the app showed suggestions for accounts to follow.

Read more