January 20, 2012

Although Wikipedia Made a Strong and Successful Statement With Wednesday's Blackout, Many Of the Site's Editors Were Not Supportive — Saying the Protest Action May Have Threatened the Credibility Of Their Work

This week's shutdown of Wikipedia, one of the Internet's most visited sites, did not sit well with some of its volunteer editors, who say the protest of anti-piracy legislation may have threatened the credibility of their work. "My main concern is that it put the organization in the role of advocacy, and that's a slippery slope," said editor Robert Lawton, a Michigan computer consultant who would prefer that the encyclopedia stick to being a neutral repository of knowledge. "Before we know it, we're blacked out because we want to save the whales." Wikipedia shut down access to its English-language site for 24 hours at midnight on Tuesday. Instead of encyclopedia articles, visitors saw information about the two congressional bills and details about how to reach lawmakers. It is the first time the English site has been blacked out. Wikipedia's Italian site came down once briefly in protest to an Internet censorship bill put forward by the Berlusconi government — and like the current SOPA and PIPA bills so far, that bill did not advance. Since Wikipedia depends on a small army of volunteers who create and update articles, it's particularly concerned about a lack of exemptions in the bills for sites where users might contribute copyrighted content. Today, it has no obligation under U.S. law except removing that content if a copyright holder complains — but under the House version of the bill, it could be shut down unless it polices its own pages. But some Wikipedia editors were so uneasy with the move that they blacked out their own user profile pages or resigned their administrative rights on the site to protest, an AP news release reports. Some likened the site's decision to fighting censorship with censorship. One of the site's own "five pillars" of conduct says that Wikipedia "is written from a neutral point of view." The site strives to "avoid advocacy, and we characterize information and issues rather than debate them." Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales argues that the site can maintain neutrality in content even as it takes public positions on issues. "The encyclopedia will always be neutral. The community need not be, not when the encyclopedia is threatened," he tweeted.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which administers the site, announced the blackout late Monday, after polling its community of volunteer contributors and editors and getting responses from 1,800 of them. The protest was aimed at the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect Intellectual Property Act under consideration in the Senate. "If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States," the foundation said, reports the news release by AP writer Peter Svensson.

That the bill seems unlikely to pass is another reason Lawton opposes the blackout. "I think there are far more important things for the organization to focus aside from legislation that isn't likely to pass anyway," he said. He's been contributing to Wikipedia for eight years. Danny Chia, another contributor to the site, also had mixed feelings about the blackout. The neutrality applies to the content, but a lot of people interpret it as being about the site as a whole, said the Los Altos, Calif., software engineer, according to the release.