As part of protests against proposed anti-piracy legislation in the US, the English-language version of online encyclopedia Wikipedia is going offline. The community website Reddit has also gone offline, as well as several other smaller websites, and Google is staging a homepage protest.
Users trying to access Wikipedia will instead be greeted with the following message: "For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the larges encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise interest, we are blacking out Wikipedia".
I think this is a brilliant way to bring this issue to the masses as users are more likely to take notice through disruption to their online activity than through a "boring" news item. How much impact it will have on the impending anti-piracy laws is another question, although at the moment support for the bill has fallen through.
On a personal note, I'm glad this blackout didn't occur whilst I was writing my uni dissertation. I don't know what I would've done without the use of Wikipedia to help define the complex terms.
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