Wikipedia, the internet-based encyclopaedia, was supposed to go offline on Wednesday to protest anti-piracy legislation being discussed in the US Congress. Heated internal debate on whether that was a decision logged 90,000 words just in the 24 hours before the website went dark. Once it was decided that the most dramatic of the various protests would be the one undertaken, the website’s programmers arranged it so that all visitors to site were presented with a dark screen that asked them to “imagine a world without free knowledge”. Unfortunately, Wikipedia being user-designed, nothing quite works as intended. Visitors to the website soon discovered that by pressing the “escape” key for five seconds, the dark screen disappeared. As always, on the internet, life went on.
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