On Monday (Jan 16) Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that the English version of the site will be down as a response to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently before the House of Representatives in the US. The Whitehouse has had to respond to petitions (as required anyway with numbers over 25K) so this is sure to make the petition effort even bigger.
The announcement came on twitter with @jimmy_wales tweeting “Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday! #sopa”.
With only the English part of the site going down, Wales tweeted that “comScore estimates the English Wikipedia receives 25 million average daily visitors globally.” That is very good traffic and a great platform to cause change.
Is is his place to cause change or get people involved? Of course. Whether you agree with SOPA (I don’t) or not, it is certainly noble of an industry vet throwing some weight behind an important issue.
Wales did a shout out to students to let them know that the popular educational resource will be down. Wikipedia is rated more accurate and current than Encyclopedia Britannica
Other heavy weights going dark Wednesday are (and note not all are Americain based either):
- WordPress
- Mozilla
- Tumblr
- All Cheezburger sites
- Mojang and Minecraft websites
- Major League Gaming network
- Avast!
- Tucows
Expect to see more to join today and Wednesday. It will be interesting to see what the Google doodle that day will be.
[…] mentioned in a post yesterday, many sites are going dark or advocating protest against the SOPA bill in the US. This bill affects […]
Thanks. I am not sure how much I will follow up on this as the bills are more or less dead now. Power of the masses.