Torrentfreak reports that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is considering blacking out the English version of Wikipedia as a protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act, following the success the Italian Wikipedia community had with a similar protest against restrictive legislation in Italy.
By blanking out one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, the Wikipedia founder believes the community can send a strong message to their representatives in Washington. With billions of pageviews a month, a Wikipedia protest will definitely be noticed.
“My own view is that a community strike was very powerful and successful in Italy and could be even more powerful in this case,” Wales says.
The article notes most Wikipedia users are supportive of the idea, though some are uncomfortable with Wikipedia being used for an overtly political protest. In any event, with as many pageviews as the site gets per day, the protest would certainly be noticed.
So he’s going to protest an act intended to stop copyright violation by…ceasing violation…?
Huh? Since when is Wikipedia “a violation”?
Wikimedia is considering blacking out Wikipedia to show how crippling censorship is to access of a variety of information from different sources. Remember the “right to know”? Censors don’t believe in it. They’d rather you “knew” only what they told you.