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Wikipedia to black out

Wednesday, 18 January 2012 06:50 Written by MD. Sakib Chowdhury

Wikipedia to black out all 3.8 million English-language pages to protest PIPA

In protest of PIPA, which is the Protect IP Act, Wikipedia has decided to black out all English language articles on its site on Wednesday. The proposed bill is set to go before the Senate for a vote on January 24 and Wikipedia is certainly not the only company that is in protest of the bill. Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, confirmed the protest plan on his Twitter account, saying that it was a “community decision.” There are almost four million English articles on Wikipedia and the online encyclopedia plans to black those articles out for a full 24 hours. Wales believes that during that time, more than 100 million people will attempt to view one of the blocked pages. Wales asked the Wikipedia community what they thought about the blackout last December. Almost 7 percent of the community thought that it was a good idea. There are a number of other sites that plan to protest PIPA in the same manner, including Reddit.com, IHeartChaos.com, BoingBoing.net, and all of the Cheezburger Network websites. Reddit.com was actually the first to propose the blackout, but their main target was another internet bill.

The blackouts were also supposed to be in protest of SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act. However, Eric Cantor, the majoring leader in the House, said that SOPA would not be coming up for a vote just yet. The White House released a statement last week that said they would not be supporting either PIPA or SOPA because they do not support any legislation that reduces freedom of speech or increases the risks of cyber attacks. Companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, Mozilla, and EBay have all formally opposed the bill.

Wikipedia plans to replace the English language articles with information about the protest. It is estimated that 25 million visitors access one of the English language pages on Wikipedia each day.