Because they thought it was too ‘woke’ and wanted to burn the books.
FWIW you can download it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
Edit: Lots of good answers. When I ask the question I mean the main site. We would all have access to it. Hell I downloaded the text yesterday on two computers. I mean could the masses ever be denied access to wikipedia in the only form they are used to?
Yes they could in several ways but not without causing massive upraw.
They could put financial pressure on Wikipedia by making payment processors stop working with them like they did with Wikileaks.
They could get ICANN to pull their domain. (I doubt ICANN will do it though)
They could tell ISPs to stop resolving Wikipedia’s domains on their name servers.Authoritarians don’t care about what the hoi polloi think.
I’m sure the government can do anything they want… but a lot of people have it backed up including myself
Yeah, I assume if they took down Wikipedia itself then hundreds of copies would pop up all over the place, probably hosted elsewhere, and one of them would become the primary replacement over time.
Media might be lost to some extent, but I doubt there’s any way you can take the text/information/metadata off the internet at all, and that’s the most important aspect.
Yes, but 1000 mirrors will pop up immediately if that happens. Internet is hard to control. They can’t even stop torrenting sites which is mostly used for piracy.
Yes, it’s possible. Any system built by people can be destroyed by people.
Now, of course, there would be a reaction. What specifically that would be I can’t say. I’d like to think it would cause serious blowback, but I’m also pretty jaded and don’t really have that much faith in people all the time.
Or more generally, anything that has a beginning has an end
Unlikely. They have data centers in several locations all over the world, and there are countless backup copies downloaded onto personal devices everywhere.
Probably same would happen as with TPB.
The most likely to happen is that the current administration starts censoring internet content within the US. The information would be deemed dangerous, or whatever other justification they think would work. The site itself would still exist, we just wouldn’t have legal access to it any longer.
Yes. You know when you see headlines like “internet service shut off in X country amid Y event”? It’s like that.
All of this is fleeting. If the govt decides to deny you access to anything online, they can and will. The only ones left communicating will be on radios. Backups of individual sites are great and all, and necessary, but they mean next to nothing on a grand scale if a government makes such decisions.
At this point in the timeline it is an eventuality everyone should be aware of.
Of course, there are economic reasons why internet access en masse probably won’t get shut off at the tap(s). But it may end up being the case that true, free communication, as we think of it currently, is impossible due to restrictions on speech through automoderation, or just good old coercion through fear.
What you say is true, but doesn’t really answer “Could someone take down Wikipedia [without completely shutting off the internet]”. For obvious reasons, shutting internet access completely off isn’t going to happen short of an insurrection or a war.
Shutting down Wikipedia specifically is much harder. As others have pointed out, there are many thousand copies of Wikipedia lying around on peoples private devices. If Wikipedia were actually taken down (blocked by the government in some sense) hundreds of mirrors would likely pop up immediately, and it would be more or less impossible for the government to go after each individual site that some person decides to host, short of just cutting internet access completely.
