Wikipedia may be back to full working order, but the massive online encyclopaedia says it isn’t done fighting the Stop Online Piracy Act(SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).
The Wikimedia foundation, which is the organisation behind Wikipedia and a variety of other Wiki projects, thanked the 162-million or so people who saw its message asking them “imagine a world without free knowledge”.
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The free online encyclopaedia went on to catalogue some of the achievements of those who felt called to action:
You said no. You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. From all around the world your messages dominated social media and the news. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open internet.
Perhaps the biggest success for Wikipedia, though, lies in the fact that “More than eight million looked up their elected representatives’ contact information via the Wikipedia tool”.
It cautions, however, that “SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows”.
In a longer post detailing the successes of its posts, as well as a number of the details surrounding the future of SOPA and PIPA, Wikipedia outlines its own reasons for being opposed to the proposed legislation:
in its current form, SOPA could require Wikipedia to actively monitor every site we link to, to ensure it doesn’t host infringing content. Any link to an infringing site could put us in jeopardy of being forced offline. The trust and openness that underlies the entire Wikipedia project would be threatened, and new, restrictive policies would make it harder for us to be open to new contributors.
The post also calls on US citizens to keep contacting their representatives and for people outside the US to contact their “country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs or similar government agency” to voice their opposition to “SOPA and PIPA, and any similar legislation”.
Beyond providing people with the correct resources and information in their fight against the legislation, Wikipedia makes no mention of what future oppositional action it intends making.
