English Wikipedia Shuts Down in Opposition of SOPA/PIPA

On January 16th, the Wikipedia community decided to shut down the public information sharing site for 24 hours today in a protest against the United States’ proposed legislation: The U.S. House of Representation’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the U.S. Senate’s PROTECTIP (PIPA.) If passed, the proposed legislation will have a major impact on the Internet, giving the government the power to censor content and restrict the country’s Internet access, even forcing some websites that facilitate piracy to shut down.

Wikipedia is the most popular and powerful example of crowdsourcing to date, and its involvement is having quite the impact. Since Tuesday, when the Blackout was announced, over 18,000 Wikipedia users have united over the Internet to discuss the controversial legislative Bills, their possible intentional and unintentional consequences, and express their opinions of the act.

Today Wikipedians from around the world have spoken about their opposition to this destructive legislation. This is an extraordinary action for our community to take - and 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.
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Wikipedia should be restored for normal access on January 19th.