OK, Wikipedia, we get it.

Your little hijack of flashing the article we’re looking up, then your little protest screen is all very well done.

But couldn’t you have done this on the weekend, when I don’t need to reference you for my tutoring work?

Turn off Javascript when you’re on Wikipedia. Problem solved.

Use the Google cache.

Thanks for the assist.

I assume they didn’t want to do it on a weekend so it would come to the attention of as many people as possible.

I’m a wikipedia junkie, but I can’t bring myself to get upset over the guys who own it deciding what to do with a free service.

And I can’t believe I didn’t think about using the cache feature. Brilliant.

You don’t have to turn off java script.

Go to the wikipedia main page.
Type in the term you want
As it loads (when you can see the text), hit escape.

Sorry, no. They’re entitled, and the middle of a week is great time to do this, so people can realise how intrusive SOPA actually would be. Inconveniencing you is the whole point.

And if you’re using Wikipedia as your reference for tutoring, I’m glad I’m not in your class. I love Wikipedia, but I’d expect a better academic standard from my tutors.

It’s not at all clear to me that this would be an actual effect of this bill.

Wikipedia is a reference point, not a reference.

Exactly.

Why don’t you actually do something about it then? (Presuming you’re in the US as is statistically likely (and indicated in your profile), and not in some other country where, to be frank, our influence on US politics is near-zero)

A huge amount about US copyright law affects people in other countries, from legal threats to foreign DNS seizures to ridiculous harmonization attempts, and I can do jack about it.

(and since I just noticed this is the pit): Fuck you and your whining! Pick up a goddamn pen or your phone or something! :mad:

another thread

participants are major information providers.

Sign the petition and stop whining, people survived without Wiki for centuries you can last one day.

Wikipedia is generally pretty good about enforcing copyright, but there have been instances in the past where a person or institution claims they’re breaking copyright and wikipedia decides that they’re in the right and keep it up. For example, a few years back a museum claimed that images of paintings put on their website were under their copywrite while wikipedia disagreed, since the paintings themselves were several hundred years old an obviously in the public domain.

So its hardly inconceivable that should SOPA pass, it could be used to delist wikipedia, at least until things got sorted out.

That would have been kind of stupid. The House Judiciary Committee was supposed to hold hearings on the bill today, which is why Wikipedia and Reddit and other sites chose to go dark today. However the hearing has been delayed for about a month.

[Moderating]
Even in the Pit, saying “Fuck you,” to other posters is against the rules. Please don’t do this again.
[/Moderating]

Something I mentioned in the other thread, I expected this to be more Critical Mass inconvenient, not “oh look, Google is doing anonymous porn” kind of unnoticeable. As has been mentioned, Wiki isn’t really down, and Google’s efforts are beyond trivial. I don’t want to be inconvenienced, but this is nothing to start a Pit thread over.

Now if the SDMB had joined in…

Nah, it would take the porn sites going dark to bring people out in the streets with pitchforks.

If you think that an anti-censorship protest (or, hell, any protest) should be shuffled off to where it’s not a hindrance to anyone, then no, you don’t get it.