The Wikipedia community has blacked out the English version of the Wikipedia website for 24 hours today to protest against the legislation being proposed by the U.S. Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. The website said the blackout wills last 24 hours from midnight to midnight Eastern Standard Time.
The website said, the decision was made by Wikipedia’s global community of editors, the people who built Wikipedia. It said, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, also opposes SOPA and PIPA, and supports the editors' blackout. It maintained that, the SOPA and PIPA are real threats to the free and open Internet.
The protest was also joined by the search engine website Google Inc, did not shut down its site, but around midnight covered most of the logo on its U.S. homepage with a black box adding a link asking users to tell the US Congress to not to censor the web.
