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Wikipedia is voluntarily shutting down its server farm for 24 hours this week in a protest against internet piracy laws in the United States (SOPA ~ Stop The Online Piracy Act)

The UK version of the site is expected to be offline from 5AM GMT on Wed 18th Jan till 5AM GMT on Thurs 19th Jan.

A major target of the protest, SOPA has already been halted by their opposition at the White House, but Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, said the blackout will go ahead as planned. During the blackout users will not be seeing the usual database of more than 3.8million articles but a holding page urging them to contact congress.

'jimmy_wales' Tweeted -
"This is going to be wow. I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday. Tell everyone you know!"

He went on to argue that SOPA's companion legislation, PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act), under consideration by the Senate, also posed a threat to websites.

“PIPA is still extremely dangerous,” Mr Wales wrote.

He is expecting that around 100 million English-speaking Wikipedia users will be affected by the blackout and then urged students to “do your homework early”.

Wikipedia is the 6th most visited website in the world, according to Alexa. The protest is to be matched on other major websites throughout the world.

Tuesday January 17^th 2012
The Onlines