Wikipedia

For months, Wikipedia has been battling a company called “Wiki-PR,” which purportedly sells paid editing services on the well-known online encyclopedia. In October 2013, Wikipedia announced it blocked or banned hundreds of editor accounts in response.

Now the Wikimedia Foundation (which runs Wikipedia) is escalating its game: on Tuesday it issued a cease and desist letter to Wiki-PR, demanding that the company immediately halt editing Wikipedia “unless and until [Wiki-PR has] fully complied with the terms and conditions outlined by the Wikimedia Community.”

For about the last five years, Wikipedia has had trouble getting and keeping new volunteer editors. The foundation behind Wikipedia has made building up the editor base a major goal, and is attacking it from all angles, such as encouraging a culture that is friendlier to newbies, creating an easier sign-up page, and making the editing process more intutitive.

But what if the decline in engagement has little to do with culture or the design of the site? What if, instead, it's that there's just less for new Wikipedians to do?

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has joined the opposition to the Communications Data Bill that was proposed by the UK government earlier this year. Civil rights groups have raised the alarm about provisions that could require British ISPs to keep records of every website their customers visit for 12 months. Now Wales is threatening to enable encryption on Wikipedia for UK Web users to protect their privacy.

Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia was knocked offline on Monday thanks to two accidentally cut cables near a data centre in Florida.

The site, and various associated services, were inaccessible or extremely sluggish for over two hours beginning at around 1430 BST on Monday.

A status web page showed various parts of the Wikimedia network as suffering performance issues. Wikipedia ruled out any suggestion of malicious intent being behind problem. The two cables, which stretched between Tampa and Virginia, were broken for an hour and six minutes, the site said.

Visitors to Wikipedia who see advertisements on the site have most likely fallen victim to a browser-based malware infection, Wikimedia Foundation, the organization operating the website, said on Monday.

"We never run ads on Wikipedia," said Philippe Beaudette, director of community advocacy for the Wikimedia Foundation, in a blog post. "If you're seeing advertisements for a for-profit industry ... or anything but our fundraiser, then your web browser has likely been infected with malware."

In the days of my youth, we didn't have “the Internet” to just go and Google stuff. Back then, it was either go to the library (yes, that funny place with books), or if you were lucky enough, you had a an encyclopaedia set at home. Those days are long gone.

The Wikimedia Foundation has completed the process of transferring its domains away from Go Daddy in response to Go Daddy's initial support for the Stop Online Piracy Act, the foundation said last week.

If a day without Wikipedia was a bother, think bigger. In this plugged-in world, we would barely be able to cope if the entire Internet went down in a city, state or country for a day or a week.

Sure, we'd survive. People have done it. Countries have, as Egypt did last year during the anti-government protests. And most of civilization went along until the 1990s without the Internet. But now we're so intertwined socially, financially and industrially that suddenly going back to the 1980s would hit the world as hard as a natural disaster, experts say.