

Jimmy Wales on Italian Wikipedia black-out - daviday
http://www.journalismfestival.com/news/exclusive-ijf-interview-of-jimmy-wales-co-founder-of-wikipedia/

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radu_floricica
> The Italian government has just announced (16.30 CET, 05 October) that it
> will modify the proposed law to include only large online news websites and
> that all others (including blogs and Wikipedia entries) will be excluded.
> This is widely seen as a victory for the Wikipedia campaign.

Seems to me like exactly the outcome the initiators of the law desired. Make
an obviously absurd first draft, "tone it down", get it passed and everybody's
praising them for their moderation. Meanwhile, it's exactly the "large online
news websites" that were targeted.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Indeed. I note that Jimmy Wales is not fooled:

 _I think it is a victory for Wikipedia, but remains a serious blow against
press freedom in Italy._

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_delirium
An interesting angle of this, which Wales highlighted, is that it was a
community decision made entirely by the Italian Wikipedia's editors. Afaik,
that makes Wikipedia the only top website where the _userbase_ controls the
website in some sort of effective, practical manner, so that it's even
possible to temporarily take it down as a protest. With most other sites, it
would've had to be a top-down decision of the site owner.

I suppose the next closest might be convincing people to mass-blank their
tumblrs, but that has a certain collective-action-coordination problem.

