Wikipedia Debates Strike Over SOPA 175
An anonymous reader writes "Jimbo Wales has suggested that English Wikipedia restrict its services for a period to protest against the anti-piracy SOPA bill in the United States. This follows a similar action by the Italian Wikipedia last month."
Reader fiannaFailMan points out another bit of Wikipedia news: they've taken the wraps off a prototype for a new visual editor. A sandbox is available to try out. The Wikimedia Foundation hopes easier, more intuitive editing will shore up waning contributor numbers.
Visual editor? About damned time (Score:2, Interesting)
I went with Drupal rather than a Wiki because I didn't want to have to write everything in wiki format. Just didn't want to learn another syntax. Have been forced to muddle with it anyway to update some articles.
Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll support this. This will provide so much more (negative) publicity to SOPA than anything any other group has done to date. GO JIMBO!
Fully agree ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Shut wikipedia down for 24 hours (yes, that long, it should really hurt) with some placeholder site saying that this is to protest against SOPA!
Help us Wikipedia, you're our only hope. (Score:5, Interesting)
Excellent! This would affect me heaps as I use wikipedia many times each day. Given it affects me, I know it would affect many others, and so hopefully it would raise the profile of what's happening.
Hopefully other companies which are against it, such as Google, can do something similar.
Either way, if they start doing stuff like this, that SOPA bill will get a lot more publicity about how bad it is, and it will be dead in the water.
Re:Fully agree ... (Score:5, Interesting)
What about a week but with a link to proceed to the content anyway?
Dear Wikipedia Assholes. FU. (Score:1, Interesting)
Some time ago, I started to create an article on an entity which is currently in the news, causing great controversy on this side of the pond, and is generally being a dick.
Now, this entity has been slapped down in court, but is still causing merry hell.
Now, what did a Wikipedia (oh great god thou art) Editor say?
Not relevant. If this POS wins the court case, or gets law changed, or is relevant in any way, then yes, a page is warranted.
WTF???
There is now a hundred news articles on this. But, oh not, it's not in the US so it can't be that important to create a whole brand new PAGE. Oh no. Not even when existing pages link to this missing page.
Recently, this same organisation has started to attack others. Still, no page on wikipedia explaining who and what this organisation is for the public to be able to reference.
Now, how is this relevant? Easy. This is like not having a page for Tivo or similar which has and is shaping our world. Perhaps in 10 years the article will be worthless, but today it affects our lives.
It's not happening in the US therefore it isn't relevant (is what I read from the delete reasons).
This is why I don't care to edit any more. I won't. Why waste my valuable time which I am giving to contribute to the pool of knowledge when some dick deletes articles because it has not affected the USA.
FU
FO
If need be, die. See how many articles you have when your contributors twindle to the hundreds.