SOPA blackout: Wikipedia still accessible -- with a little effort

Wikipedia is the biggest name among the approximately 10,000 websites that pledged to go dark Wednesday in a broad Internet protest of the SOPA and PIPA online anti-piracy bills. But word has quickly spread about how to circumvent the blackout.

Visitors to Wikipedia's English-language site -- either directly to its homepage or via a link from a search engine query -- are diverted in seconds to a dark page that asks people to "Imagine a world without free knowledge." There's a couple of sentences about threat from the bills, and a box to enter your ZIP code to help contact your member of Congress about the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect-IP Act.

Mashable.com lists a couple of ways to bypass the blackout screen and get to Wikipedia's pages.

PHOTOS: Sites on strike

The easiest is to go to Wikipedia's mobile version, which is not being blacked out. You don't have to use a mobile device to do it. The mobile version is available via your Web browser at en.m.wikipedia.org.

There's a black bar at the top that notes the piracy protest, but the rest of the site is fully accessible.

Another easy workaround is the Simple English version of Wikipedia, which is designed for children and adults learning the language. It's not as extensive as Wikipedia's main site, but could be helpful for youngsters working on school projects.

The Village Voice offers another alternative. Wikipedia's foreign-language sites -- with dozens of options, from Afrikaans to Zeêuws -- are not participating in the blackout and are open for surfing if you're multilngual or have quick access to Rosetta Stone.

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Photo: A laptop in London shows Wikipedia's protest page on Wednesday. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images

SOPA anti-piracy bill markup to resume next month, lawmaker says

One day before major players in the online community plan to launch a virtual protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) making its way through Congress, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) issued a statement saying the committee will delay its markup of the bill until February.

But Smith said the delay is unrelated to Wikipedia's announcement that it would black out its English sites for 24 hours, or to Reddit's decision to black out its site for 12 hours, or to Google's announcement that it will place a link on its homepage to highlight its opposition to the bill.

In a statement released Tuesday afternoon, Smith said the delay was because of Republican and Democratic retreats scheduled for the next few weeks.

Then he reiterated his commitment to sending the bill to the White House.

"To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America's intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy," Smith said. “I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House that saves American jobs and protects intellectual property."

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Photo: Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.), left, and Lamar Smith (R-Texas) are members of the House Judiciary Committee. Credit: Alex Wong AFP/Getty Images

SOPA blackout: Wikipedia, Mozilla, Reddit to go dark tonight

What does an Internet strike look like? You're about to find out.

Wikipedia, Reddit, BoingBoing and hundreds of other websites have pledged to go dark Tuesday night to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) -- two anti-piracy bills that are currently making their way through Congress.

"This is an extraordinary action for our community to take," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in a statement Monday announcing Wikipedia's decision to go dark. "While we regret having to prevent the world from having access to Wikipedia for even a second, we simply cannot ignore the fact that SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world."

Wikipedia -- the Web's fifth-most popular property with 470 million monthly users -- is the largest Web entity to declare its intent to go dark, but it joins many other websites that have already pledged to shut down for 12 to 24 hours to draw attention to legislation that they say will hasten the end of the free Internet.

Reddit was one of the trailblazers of the blackout movement, declaring its intent to go dark on Jan. 10. Two days later, Ben Huh, chief executive of Cheezburger, which has a network of 50 sites including the seminal ICanHasCheezburger as well as Fail Blog, Know Your Meme and the Daily What, said his sites would be joining the strike.

Blackouts are not the only types of protest you'll find online Wednesday. Google announced Tuesday that, while its search engine will continue to function, the company will place a link on its home page to highlight its opposition to the bills.

“Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and Web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” Samantha Smith, a Google spokeswoman, said in an email Tuesday. “So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our U.S. home page.”

And Scribd, which claims to be the world's largest online repository of documents, said visitors to its website would find a pop-up roadblock Wednesday in protest of SOPA and PIPA that will lead to a call to action and an online petition. 

Craigslist started its protest early. A starred section at the top of the site urges users to "help put a stop to this madness" and links to a page dedicated to the topic.

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Image: The Wikipedia home page.

Where's my Wikipedia? SOPA, PIPA blackout coming

Wikipedia is among hundreds of websites that will be showing just how they feel about SOPA  by going dark Wednesday.

The English-language version of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, will be shut down for 24 hours in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, now working their way through Congress.

Jimmy Wales, site co-founder, told the BBC's Martha Kearney on Tuesday morning that "tomorrow from midnight Washington D.C. time until midnight the entire day of Wednesday, we're going to blank out" the English version of Wikipedia and post a message of protest.

He told Kearney that the legislation makes "something like Wikipedia essentially impossible ... if the provider has to police everything that everyone is doing on the site."

Websites taking part in the so-called SOPA Strike include Mozilla, Reddit, WordPress and Boing Boing.

Twitter was hopping Tuesday morning with the news:

From the BBC's Philippia Thomas: "#Twitter chief says 'Closing a global business in reaction to a single-issue national politics is foolish'. How about that #Wikipedia?"

Greenpeace tweeted:  " 'We're sorry, you're not allowed to read this.' Join us in saying no to corporate censorship of the internet."

The MPAA and others who support the law say the Internet operators have it all wrong. As the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday:

The Motion Picture Assn. of America and others driving the legislation said real progress had been made toward creating a law that would protect intellectual property. The advocates said misinformation is inflaming passions on the Web while doing nothing to solve the problem of piracy.

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Photo: Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales in 2011.  Credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth / Associated Press

Wikipedia collects record $20 million in latest fundraiser

There's something kind of heartwarming about the annual Wikipedia fundraiser, which came to a close Jan. 1.

Each year, the world's fifth-most popular Web property asks its monthly 470 million users to pony up some money to keep the gears turning at Wikimedia's San Francisco headquarters, and each year the world responds by sending donations in varying amounts, from $5 to $500,000.

This year the company raised more than $20 million. The money came from more than 1 million donors in almost every country in the world.

It's the most the organization has ever raised since it started the annual fundraiser in 2003.

"Our model is working fantastically well," Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a statement. "Ordinary people use Wikipedia and they like it, so they chip in some cash so it will continue to thrive. That maintains our independence and lets us focus solely on providing a useful public service."

Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, says it will use the money to pay for new hardware, enhance the site's functionality, provide legal representation for its projects, support the large community of Wikimedia volunteers and expand its mobile services.

The organization said that its 2011-12 operating budget is $28.3 million. The rest of the money will come from grants and additional donations collected year-round.

Wikipedia has 20 million articles in 282 languages and more than 100,000 volunteers worldwide who contribute to and vet Wikipedia content.

The site also has a birthday coming up. According to the release, Jan. 15 marks the 11th anniversary of the online encyclopedia.

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Image: A screen grab of the Wikipedia homepage.

Wael Ghonim, Google exec, says Egypt's revolution is 'like Wikipedia'

Wael Ghonim has been touted as one of the leaders in Egypt's revolution and has already coined the phrase Revolution 2.0 — which he also plans to take as the name of a book he's writing.

On Sunday, in an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," Ghonim spoke further on the peaceful protests in Egypt that lead to the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, who led Egypt for three decades.

"I call this Revolution 2.0," Ghonim said in the interview. "Revolution 2.0 is, is — I say that our revolution is like Wikipedia, OK? Everyone is contributing content. You don't know the names of the people contributing the content ... This is exactly what happened. Revolution 2.0 in Egypt was exactly the same."

"Everyone was contributing small pieces, bits and pieces. We drew this whole picture. We drew this whole picture of a revolution. And that picture — no one is the hero in that picture."

The 18-day period of protests in Egypt were organized by Ghonim and many others using social media sites and other tools.

Ghonim, Google's head of marketing in the Middle East and North Africa, was one of the moderators of a Facebook page called "We Are All Khaled Said" dedicated to memory of an Egyptian man who witnesses say was beaten to death in Alexandria by police officers who have not been held to account.

"The moment we announced on the page, the locations, they shut down Facebook," Ghonim said.

"But I had a backup plan. I used Google Groups to send a mass mail campaign to all these people in order to tell them here are the locations and please spread it among your friends And everyone knew eventually."

"So, definitely technology played a great role here. You know, it helped keeping people informed, it helped making all of us collaborate."

During the protests, Ghonim was detained by the Egyptian government for 12 days — and kept blindfolded the entire time, he said.

Once Mubarak stepped down on Friday, and the government was dissolved, the Egyptian military took over. Egypt's army said it will govern for the next six months or until an election is held for a new parliament and presidency.

Ghonim and the tens of thousands who took part in the historic uprising, hope that new system of government will be a democratic one and work is already being done to figure out how to get the ball rolling.

"We just created a page using Google moderator asking people what are you dreaming about — that was a couple hours ago," Ghonim said Sunday. "So far, before the interview when I checked we had 4,000 suggestions and we had over 100,000 votes. Everyone is now dreaming. Everyone wants to do something. A lot of these ideas are amazing."

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Top photo: Google marketing executive Wael Ghonim, weakened after nearly two weeks in custody, is helped off the stage after greeting thousands of anti-government protesters in Tahrir Square on Feb. 8 in Cairo. Credit: John Moore/Getty Images

Bottom photo: An Egyptian anti-government protester holds a photograph of Wael Ghonim, in Tahrir square, Cairo, on Feb. 9. Credit: Andre Pain/EPA

Wikipedia is 10 years old and still a bit idealistic

Wikipedia turned 10 on Saturday -- a decade of operation for the free encyclopedia built largely by volunteers on the Web.

And, just as anyone would hope for a 10-year-old,  Wikipedia is still a bit idealistic, a vestige of the Internet's early free and heroic days, writes Timothy Garton Ash for The Times' Op-Ed section.

The site is currently the fifth-most visited Website on the Internet, with about 400 million people visiting each day, looking up information on just about anything -- science, math, languages, art, culture, company histories and entries on sports stars, too.

Garton Ash not only contributes to The Times' Op-Ed pages. He's also a fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of European studies at Oxford University.

Of Wikipedia's first double-digit anniversary, he writes:

What is extraordinary about this free encyclopedia, which contains more than 17 million articles in more than 270 languages, is that it is written, edited and self-regulated almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. All the other most-visited sites are multibillion-dollar businesses; Facebook, with just 100 million more users, has been valued at $50 billion.

Visit Google in Silicon Valley and you find yourself in a vast complex of modern buildings, like the capital of a superpower. You have to sign a nondisclosure agreement before you even get through the door. The language of Google executives veers between that of a U.N. secretary-general and a car salesman. One moment we're talking universal human rights, the next "rolling out a new product."

But Wikipedia makes no profit off of its popularity, not because of any inability to do so, Garton Ash notes. Rather, the Website stays free of charge and nonprofit by choice -- a choice that has grown rare in the ever-growing landscape of Tech companies looking to reach millions of users on the Web.

Wikipedia is overseen by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which occupies one floor in an anonymous office building in downtown San Francisco. You have to knock hard on the door to gain admission. If Wikipedia's founder and principal architect, Jimmy Wales, had chosen to commercialize the enterprise, he could be worth billions, like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Putting it all under the not-for-profit umbrella was, Wales quipped to me, at once the stupidest and the cleverest thing he ever did.

Garton Ash does a great job of looking a bit deeper at those who contribute to Wikipedia and its mission of bringing information, at no cost, to those who surf the Web, as well as some of the challenges the site faces.

To read the rest, check-out his Op-Ed piece Look it up: Wikipedia is turning 10.

Also, as the Technology blog noted Wednesday, there are hundreds of Wikipedia birthday parties and events taking place on Saturday. For a full list, check out Wikipedia's 10th anniversary Webpage.

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Video: Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, talks about Wikipedia's 10th anniversary. Credit: Wikimedia Foundation via Vimeo.

Wikipedia turns 10 on Saturday, looking to diversify content, authors and party a bit

Wikipedia, the world's fifth-most-popular website, is turning 10 on Saturday.

And at almost a decade old, Wikipedia still has a lot of growing to do, said co-founder and promoter Jimmy Wales and Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, in a phone conference with reporters Wednesday.

"The fundamental premise is that everybody brings their crumbs of knowledge to the table and all those crumbs become a banquet," Gardner said. "And we're missing some people from the table."

Some of those people might end up contributing to or helping to edit Wikipedia after celebrating its birthday this weekend. Wales, who has become the face of Wikipedia, will be videoconferencing into many of the parties, hoping to recruit contributors.

More than 350 events celebrating the online encyclopedia's anniversary are planned across more than 111 countries -- 10 in Germany, 13 in Pakistan and 70 of them in India, where Wikipedia is planning to open an office, Wales said.

The website could also use a greater diversity of contributors not only in terms of country of origin but also in terms of gender, educational background and language.

"The most important thing when we think about what Wikipedia looks like 10 years from now is the increased diversity in languages," Wales said. "A few years ago about two-thirds was written in English; today less than 20% is in English."

The website is also working with museums and libraries to add more information and, in some cases, more photos and multimedia to entries about the arts and other topics not normally covered as well as the sciences and technology, Wikipedia's strong suit, he said.

Gardner added that Wikipedia was also working on making its website easier to use, contribute to and edit, though it won't stray much from its roots.

"It looks a little bit awkward and a bit handcrafted; sometimes the writing is a little bit awkward," she said of the site. But because of that, people "feel like they own it. It's the people's encyclopedia. People built it, they use it, they enjoy it."

Wales also said that though Wikipedia would advance technologically, it also wouldn't change from its nonprofit status or look for ways to monetize its information.

"I don't think you should expect to see radical, radical changes," he said. "We're not going to be Facebook. We're not going to be Myspace or YouTube. We're an encyclopedia. We're text and images."

And the site will also, very likely, remain hand-written and -edited over the next decade, Wales said.

"It's easier to write it yourself than fix a Google translation," he said. "Right now, the state of machine translation is generally so bad that the best you can hope for is a general gist."

Machine translators also currently work better with what Wales called "economically important" languages.

"We don't need help in German, we don't need help in French or Spanish," he said. "What we need help in is Zulu, and nobody is investing in English-to-Zulu translations right now."

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Photo: Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales speaks during a meeting of the commission on economic modernization and technological development of the Russian economy at the Skolkovo Innovation Center outside Moscow last month. Credit: Sergei Karpukhin / AFP/Getty Images

Wikipedia set to unveil new features

Over the next few days, Wikipedia will be getting a substantial face lift. 

The biggest change the online encyclopedia will make is a changeover to a new "skin" called Vector. The difference between its current design and Vector aren't significant, but it's enough of a change that it might take some getting used to for those that don't take kindly to site changes.

A key component in that redesign is an improved navigation for both reading and editing pages. Users will find more stylish tabs at the top of each Wikipedia page telling them whether they're viewing a document or a discussion page. It will also remind them if they're reading or editing a respective entry.

It has also improved the search-suggestion feature to reportedly make it more reliable. The goal, Wikipedia said, is to get users to the "page [they] are looking for more quickly."

Those that edit Wikipedia entries will find an updated editing toolbar as well as the ability to more efficiently format pages. It has also added a "Link wizard" to include links in wikis.

All the changes, including Wikipedia's new skin, will be rolled out over the next few days. Based on user reactions to the improvements, Wikipedia plans to update the site again later this year with other improvements.

For those that want to try something new, Wikipedia has a prototype page available that allows users to click around and see all the new changes before they go live on the site.

-- Don Reisinger

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Images, from top: A view of the new navigation in Wikipedia, and the online encyclopedia's new "Link wizard." Credit: Wikipedia