Acoording to this, the number of "very active Wikipedians" last month was 3503. The number of Wikipedians with more than 5 edits is an order of magnitude larger. But it is going to be an order of magnitude fewer who are likely to have voted for what ever action is decided, exact comparisons depending on whether the closers decide to screen out new or hardly active accounts. What does this say about the (epi-)phenomenon of the "community" that Wikipedians like to pronounce about so often?

You think that's bad? Why did they stop updating most of these columns in 2009-2010?
Or these? Or these?

Except for totals, everything is trending downwards steadily, especially participation.
And they're trying to cover it up.

The number of people who look up actors from obscure old TV shows on WP is probably many more orders of magnitude larger than the 5+ crowd. I doubt they're suddenly going to start calling their senators, unless they're tea party people in which case they'll probably call to support the bill because those lefty wikipedians are opposing it and therefore opposing it would be un-american.

It reminds me of how trade union branches and university JCRs vote for all sort of causes without the majority of the membership being involved. The cause may sometimes be good (I'm sure that 30 years ago my JCR was voting to do things like condemn arpartheid) but it is the view of a handful of radicals and not that of the membership that are actually represented by the votes.

If Wikipedia decides to black itself out, I have a feeling the people who will be driven most stir-crazy are the Wikipediot overlords of the various Wikipedia fiefdoms.

Maybe not a newsflash, but it looks like Jimmy may be losing his mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=471679093

Here comes the lemmings.

Update:

There's the following thread as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_tal..._dead.2Fshelved

http://www.dailydot.com/news/sopa-postponed/

The Daily Dot has decided to include one of my talk page comments in one of their news articles.

Good show! Dudley Do-right saves the day again!

NY Times
Slate

By publicly attacking legislation, how can Wikipedia claim to be a neutral source of information? That's like letting the Zionist posse control articles about Palestine.

Feel free to point this out to the journalists who write this stuff.
Good luck getting their attention.

CBS
Washington Post

I like this Gawker item....

If they shut down completely, this is true. But they are not shutting down completely, rather they are dedicating their resources toward attempting to influence legislation. In other words, they are engaging in lobbying activities.

Prediction: this will backfire big time.

WMF can't get off their asses to design opt-in on porn, a modern text editor, or a sane dispute-resolution process, but bringing down the site in an entire country is no problem.

All those U.S. based donors are only getting 365/366 year's worth of service.

doesn't make a big difference to me, but I don't see how this makes much of an impact. US lawmakers are not going to change what they're doing because a few big sites shut down for a day (or less). They know the opposition to the laws and they don't really care.

nice statement I guess, but the blackout itself is unlikely to do much. Perhaps it will encourage more serious measures, though.

They already "printed" the black banners. They can't go back now, facts be damned. Idiots.

The whole idea of Wikipedia was to pirate content from traditional information sources, process it just enough to look like it's not completely stolen, and put it all in one place where it's easy to use.

Now we see those traditional sources are starting to dry up, because there's no profit in it anymore.

And Wikipedia won't always be there either, as they make clear 100% by shutting down on 1/18/12.

If anything, the idea that Wikipedia won't always be there, and that these fly-by-night pirate sites managed by greedy post-pornographer slackers are unreliable and won't always be around, pushes me towards supporting some kind of measure to protect real content generators.

That's not even something I want... bureaucrats suck at that crap the only people who would prosper from these regs are the ones getting the gov't funds or helping organizations to comply with what are likely to be reams of stupid rules.

Agreed.

What I like is that they've gone from blacking out the USA to a global blackout.

There is only one thing that can stop it now, unqualified support for the switching off of Wikipedia from Wikipedia Review. Well, the 18th is one day when we can all rest easy knowing there will be no WikiCrap spouting forth, so bring it on! Perhaps they can make it a daily protest until Government unequivocally refuses to legislate on the Internet ever.

Since it will probably be removed. (hopefully not oversighted)

News of the blackout was on the front page of the London Metro this morning, with the title “Stock up on your dodgy facts and faked biographies. There’s about to be a WIKIPEDIA BLACKOUT”. They quote Max Groves saying “How am I supposed to get inaccurate information now?”, and Jimmy saying “I’m proud to be able in some small way to have a leadership role against censorship”, and that he hopes it will melt phone systems in Washington.

Shows how seriously they are taking it.

I have posted my own protest statement.

Good for you, Scott. You should have done this years ago, but this is a good time to make a stink.

If only you could talk some of the crazier admins into doing something similar. I fully expect that some of them will try to log in on Wednesday, find they can't, and go berserk.

This story is a classic. 282 languages? Not a word about the fact that 2/3 of those 282 Wikipedias contain less than 10,000 articles, and less than 100 regular users? And are practically or completely morbid, as most of the contributors have quit?

And now "wikiality" comes full circle. Best comment:

Oh, that's hilarious - newsworthy in itself.

Maybe I should write an article about the media storm that will occur when they discuss the irony of that article - then someone can AFD that, and the circle will be complete


My protest statement:

So the strongest action gets supported even though I think more people voted for no action or a weaker form of action. (It would need checking to see exactly how many people appeared in each column.) It also did not reach Wikipedia's normal standards for a concensus. It all reminds me of one of my most extreme encounters with shamocracy.

Way back around the time that the median Wikipedian was being born, Margaret Thatcher had won her third "landslide" election victory (42.2% of votes cast <32% of total electorate). At this point she had started to believe in her political immortality and was becoming increasingly dotty believing that she could introduce anything she wanted. She decided to change local taxation from a property tax to a poll tax.

I joined my local anti-poll tax group. We agreed that we would not be politically alligned and that no political group should distribute their literature from our stall. However, one evening we (or at least that small fraction of the group who bothered to attend weekly meetings) turned up at our meeting to see hordes of people we had never seen before. They voted for us to affiliate to the area anti-poll tax federation which in turn was affiliated to a national federation all of whose leaders belonged to the Militant Tendency, a group which was also in the news around that time for its entryist tactics attempting to take control of the Labour Party. They also elected a representative to the area federation who was not involved in doing any of the real donkey and received no votes from the regular members. He soon started trying to sell Militant from our anti-poll tax stall but his backers never appeared again at another of our meetings and we told him where to go.

The poll tax proved to be Thatcher's downfall. It took rather longer for Tommy Sheridan, the head of the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation to eventually get his comeuppance and be jailed for three years for perjury. I haven't a clue what happenned to the non-entity who was our local delegate to the federation, presumably he just disappeared back under a stone somewhere.

In the current situation we have a combination of Jimbo having the same self-belief of Thatcher, Blair, Gaddhaffi and other autocrats who have been in office for too long, with vote flooding by outside activists and with the vast majority of regular Wikipedians not taking part in the vote. The action is portrayed in the news (at least the BBC which I have on) as being by "Wikipedia". In reality it is by an autocrat, a few of his hangers-on and a load of outsiders. The majority of Wikipedians have not expressed their views and no one can know whether they back the action or not.

Which is legally permissible, and even somewhat expected, of charities. A charity may lobby for or against the passage of legislation which has some bearing toward its charitable purpose or methods.


Donors are not entitled to any particular level or grade of service. That's why they're called "donors".


This is, what, the third or fourth time that Jimmy has disrupted Wikipedia for his own purposes? If you ever doubted that Jimmy still believes that he owns Wikipedia, doubt no more.

There's another issue.

In their rush to do this, there's been little thought or contingency planning. En.Wikipedia will be locked, but still readable via mobile (so I'm told). Net result, any vandalism, even libellous vandalism, that is unreverted at shut-down, will necessarily remain for the 24 hour period. No one can correct it, not even OTRS.

If someone, say, puts obscenities on some bearded chap's page, it will be on every mobile phone for 24 hours.

I wonder how many radio phone-ins there are going to be connected with this topic? As it's related to US-legislation I can't see the BBC having one, but I can imagine some in America. It will be an opportunity for anyone with something against Wikipedia to get themselves on air.

Then there are all those newspaper letter columns. It will also make whatever article Dan Murphy is preparing seem more topical if he were to get on the phone to newsdesks or to Sunday feature editors.

Jimmy may have opened the door for all sorts of publicity he does not want.

This story should be called a SOPA opera.

I wouldn't say it's expected. It is sometimes allowed, with limits, under 501(h), which Congress added in 1976 (before then anything more than insubstantial lobbying by charities was just plain prohibited). Only a small portion of charities elect 501(h) treatment, and as of the latest published 990 (for the 2009-2010 fiscal year), WMF wasn't one of them.

I chortled when KoshVorlon blanked your page with the edit summary "This will be VERY unpopular, but I'm blanking as this violates WP:POLEMIC. Sorry, Scott".

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Wikipedia has several problems, but this is most definitely not one of them. I supported the community's decision to do this. Jimbo Wales has done a fair bit of attention-whoring for the media, as the Sole Founder, and he may be exploiting WP's SOPA blackout for the purposes of self-promotion (as he usually does). However, the blackout was not a unilateral decision by Jimbo or the WMF Board; it was a consensus decision made by English Wikipedians, and they are in the right on this issue. There is no excuse anymore for cowardly submission to violation of our civil liberties, and while I did not participate in the Wikipedia discussion (I left a comment on the blog in support of the decision) I am glad that Wikipedians did not let a commitment to "neutrality" repress their desire to take a stand. Making sharing a crime would be totalitarian. The out-of-touch politicians who insist on pushing this BS and the greedy companies that they serve don't seem to realize that they can't control the Internet. It is unrealistic to even try. Why can't they just accept that the strict definitions of creative content as "property" that they are clinging to have shifted, and can no longer be imposed on everything?

Those who wish to sign (one) petition to defend our rights to freely share creative material on the Internet can go here.

Google also has a petition to stop SOPA/PIPA (available here. One of its problems is that calls to "end piracy", which insinuates that file sharing is actually a detrimental problem and needs to be banned. The freedom to share artistic works (including music files and movies) online deserves protection, both from digital restrictions management and the government; this right is integral to the survival of a free and open commons on the internet.

Regardless of this problems, I did sign the petition, as I agree that large corporations and certain congresspeople are trying to sabotage our rights online with nasty laws like PIPA and SOPA. Even without these mean-spirited pieces of legislation, digital rights in the US are under threat (as was proven by the ridiculous indictment of MegaUpload, who should have known better than to trust the US government). But that still doesn't mean SOPA and PIPA won't make it worse if passed, they almost surely will.

If passed, these pieces of legislation would affect more than just one specific country, because so many international websites are hosted in the US, and because SOPA specifically targets foreign websites for censorship in the US.

It heartens me to know that this assault on civil liberties hasn't gone unchallenged.

pretty worthless block. Just refresh the page and hit escape, easy fix. Or if you were using google chrome, all one had to do was let the page load and quickly hit the stop button. it took a good 2-3 seconds for the dark page to show up.

locking wikipedia from editing was definitely the biggest decision, not forcing readers to some lame blackness.

So far, I'm counting nine (9) contributions since your announcement that you would not be contributing.



Your right to download free Hollywood movies from Kazakhstani web servers must not be abridged!

You can count! None of them really "contribute" anything to the project.


Blame Selina, I had nowhere else to play.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...rt_SOPA_or_PIPA

Here's a discussion on a page that some consider to be informative and useful and others consider to be a hit list.

Duly noted. I knew that would be your come-back.

Let me know when you're ready to do some paid editing. That's the final stop in Wikipedia-shunning.

Been there, done that - written the book!

Prove it. Right or not, the WMF is a nonprofit, and in both the US AND in the UK, nonprofit charities
are NOT supposed to engage in "political advocacy".

Not engage "substantially".

Hey, nothing wrong with that Copying is not theft.

It seems that the United States Government simply will not tolerate free Hollywood movies on servers in its country, so that rules out (at least legally) using US servers. Thankfully, if what you're saying is true about Kazakh servers, the Kazakh government isn't as mean (at least in that regard) as the US.

The reason something like SOPA is needed is because of little shits like you.

Leave it to SBJ to make it personal. He's more like Ottava than he'd like to admit.

Copyright violation is not "theft." That's a trope promoted by involved interests and people who want to amplify their arguments with some hyperbole.

Copyright violation is copyright violation, a creature of law. Theft is a common-law violation. Copyright violation is, under common law, at worst, a tort.

Indeed. Likewise, "intellectual property" is a legal device (perhaps "fiction" would be applicable as well), subject to variance in definition. Creative material's classification as "property" is an abstract social construct and is often used as a legal weapon against sharing.

I don't know what I did to piss off SB Johnny, but I can assure him that I didn't download any free Hollywood movies (from Kazakh servers or otherwise). They are likely to be of shitty quality, and probably not worth watching in the first place.

Even so, punishing people for downloading them freely, as if it were Soviet samizdat in Stalinist Russia, is incredibly authoritarian IMHO.

You didn't piss me off, it's just that you're just a perfect example of the problem (because if people like you didn't think pirating music or films was a fine and dandy thing, there would presumably be no need for a law to encourage you to cut it out).

Patents and copyrights aren't evil, even if they are social constructs. Lots of social constructs aren't evil..

So how then can you be convicted of theft of government information even if all you did was copy the information. The government still having the information?
http://lawschool.courtroomview.com/acf_cas...states-v-girard

So what about the arrest of Kim Schmitz and the shutdown of Megaupload?

Interesting timing, this, coming one day after the Wikipedia blackout. It will probably not be in Wikipedia's interest to be seen as supporting people like Schmitz, for the sake of a vibrant Internet etc.

Copyright as originally envisioned was a way to provide a temporary haven for the author to make money in exchange for the 'property' passing into the commons.

Modifications to the copyright laws on behalf of the big publishing companies now make this 'property' ownership virtually indefinite. Author's life + 70 years.

Patents are particularly flawed in their current incarnation. They were designed around the same idea as copyrights but have turned into a mechanism to allow trivial ideas to acts as vehicles of extortion.

Both need to be revamped or utterly scrapped.

SBJ, your arguments are crap.

Two hundred years ago (in the U.S.) a copyright lasted for 14 years, and if you were still alive at the end of it, you'd get another 14-year extension. So, 28 years. Vigilant, would you say in your obviously expert opinion that if we were to return to the old 14+14 plan, we'd be fine, or would that also be the evil work of a totalitarian regime?

I didn't say I'm particularly endeared to the present copyright system, I just don't think you serve your case well by defending people who really are selling/swapping/etc. pirated movies, cds, books, or whatever. I suspect most of the hot trade is not in materials that are 70+ years old.


That's certainly more reasonable, though it might need a bit of adjusting because of the rather big changes in life expectancy since the early 1800s.