The stringent legislation would shut down literally thousands of sites and blogs (mine included), if it should be adopted and passed into law. In an official statement, Wales said, "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."
The Washington Post reports that the black-out is expected to affect some 25 million visitors. Wikipedia is one of the Top Five most visited sites on the web, with billions of unique visitors each month. Tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, eBay, AOL and others have spoken out against the legislation, saying it threatens the industry's livelihood as well as personal freedom of expression. Other popular online communities such as Reddit, Boing Boing and Live Leaks have announced plans to go dark in protest as well.
I'm hoping wikipedia gets shut down for good. It's larded with fanboy biases and errors. Kids could then get back to doing real research rather than copying whats on wikipedia.
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