Wikipedia Still Set For Full Blackout Wednesday 291
symbolset writes "Jimmy Wales confirms that the entire English language Wikipedia will be on blackout January 18th from midnight to midnight, Eastern Standard Time. The site's 25 million daily users will redirected to an education page with a call to action. Votes are still being taken on the exact implementation."
Despite a small victory against SOPA in the House, Wikipedia still feels the blackout is necessary due to the looming Senate vote on PROTECT IP, and as a deterrent to future attempts to revive a similar law under a new name.
I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Chicken! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, thanks Jimmy. (Score:1, Interesting)
I'll get around to writing to my senator right away. What? England isn't represented in the senate???
No Blackout Without Representation! Or... something...
Because English is only spoken in the USA, of course.
The Research Works Act (Score:4, Interesting)
Wouldn't mind them helping with awareness of the RWA, where publishers are basically trying to make public access policies illegal. Read more here [guardian.co.uk].
Re:Yeah, thanks Jimmy. (Score:2, Interesting)
These laws will *NOT* only affect the USA. They will affect other countries, and especially countries that extradite people to the USA when they feel like it (*hint*).
Re:Here is a blackout page suggestion: (Score:5, Interesting)
A better one....
This is exactly how much content will be left when every publisher and celebrity makes up a reason to force Wikipedia to take down their pages.
Wikipedia has cleaned up its copyright problems... But it could never have been created in the enviroent about to be unleashed.
Maybe that is the argument to make:
List every large tech company that violated the hell out of IP laws they want to impose on everybody else. Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, etc could all have been kicked off the Internet (if we had the Internet) when they were "growing up".
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
On Wednesday, yes, but today the bandwidth will be gigantic as users rush to download the whole thing [wikipedia.org].
Re:Chicken! (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed.
The US's reach grows ever longer, and the idiocy ever more severe. Nobody can place exactly when we became the Corporate States of America; historians 50 years from now may point to Citizens United, or they may point to the various copyright extension bills, especially the repetitive Mickey Mouse Protection Acts bought by Disney over and over again.
Go Global, STOP ACTA (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Chicken! (Score:4, Interesting)
Co-founder of Nupedia you should add. Wikipedia was an afterthought for people who were too impatient to get an article through the Byzantine process of getting a Nupedia article created. The funny thing is that the free-for-all process of article creation at Wikipedia ended up becoming by far and away better quality than the structured academic process that Nupedia set up.
On the positive side, Jimbo Wales did add some of the initial content to Wikipedia oh so many years ago, not that he should necessarily be proud of those contribution. This "new article" [wikipedia.org] certainly seems a bit odd for an example of a quality article. There were other edits done earlier, but the software on Wikipedia had some corruption of the edit history and some of those edits were lost even though the content has been preserved.
How about slashdot? (Score:3, Interesting)
Will slashdot join this protest?
Re:They wont be deterred. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes they can. It's called "public funding", and right now it's so shitty because they allow a superior private alternative.
You know, they talk about "campaign finance reform" being hard to figure out. It really isn't. Here's how I would do it, and I think it's a pretty solid plan.
First, a vote similar to primaries would take place before the election. Said vote would include all persons willing to run for the office who can meet a minimum requirement of X signatures of voters in the related district. This keeps out the millions of loons who might want to run for president but can't actually get people to commit to supporting them.
After this first stage is complete, these people are added to a ballot. This ballot asks that voters choose who they would (at the time) vote for the office in a non-committal way. Basically, "out of these candidates, which one is currently your favorite?".
After this is done, we'll have rough popularity numbers. This person might get 20% of the vote, this person 10%, etc. Any "abstains" on the ballot would be added to a pool and divided evenly among all the candidates to raise everyone's percentage equally.
Next, the government has mandated allocated public advertising space on the television, radio, and web. (We have no problem seizing assets when it suits us, and it may as well be in a way that's actually helpful to our country.)
The candidates get advertising space based on their percentages. If they can make something like at least 3%, then they get a guaranteed "block" of space (say 60 seconds out of one hour's total of commercial airtime). The candidates get advertising ability proportional to their ability to get votes.
All other advertising directly relating to candidates is otherwise illegal. No private money. No "PACs". Issues? Sure. People? No. You can make a big campaign about "voting Republican", but should a candidate be stupid enough to appear in said advertisement then their candidacy is immediately forfeit.
So how would the candidates get voters to pick them in the finance vote if advertising is illegal? I don't know, how about the old fashioned way? Town hall meetings. Debates. Door-to-door campaigning. Talking directly with voters.
Is my system perfect? No. Is it better than what we have now? I think so. Can someone come up with something even better than this? Probably.
Re: Citizens United (Score:2, Interesting)
The Supreme Court also failed to consider that Corporations are legal entities only because Congress passed a law saying they were (USC 1). So they basically told Congress "you have the power to create it, but you don't have the power to regulate it". Which makes no sense at all.