
Spanish Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed EU copyright law - sanbor
https://es.wikipedia.org/
======
TekMol
The web is becoming more and more fragmented. I wonder where this will lead
to. Europe seems to fall behind the US at an accelerating pace. During the
last two decades, Europe already failed to take part in building the internet.
Now Europeans all use US services. Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Dropbox,
AirBnB, Uber...

This was due to the culture of Europes entrepreneurs which is often
"bureaucracy first, product later".

Now lawmakers seem busy putting another burden on top of that. Laws that put
Europe behind the rest of the world in how easy it is to build online
services.

Where will Europe be in 20 years? Will it become a developing continent of the
digital area? Or will German Engineers somehow make up for innovation via
assiduous execution? I find it hard to see how that could work.

Politicians might think 'Now that we have the web, lets regulate it'. But I
wonder: Now that we lost the web, how will we avoid the same with AI? AI will
have orders of magnitude more impact on our lives then the web. How will we
avoid losing crypto? In the age of crypto, people might freely chose what
currency to use. Do we want the worlds currency to be owned by a US company?
How will we avoid losing biotech? Will the same happen to our bodies that
happened to our data? Will they be owned by a handful of US companies?

~~~
Cort3z
The EU says sorry for making Linux

~~~
dgut
To be fair, there wouldn't be any Linux without Unix & C, but there would
definitely exist many other "Linux", e.g the __superior__ FreeBSD. Not
diminishing Linux's achievements in any way. :-)

~~~
Lennu
One could say, to be fair, there wouldn't be any Unix & C without the
mathematics of Gottfried Leibniz from Germany. This discussion is ridiculous.

[https://www.google.com/doodles/gottfried-wilhelm-
leibnizs-37...](https://www.google.com/doodles/gottfried-wilhelm-
leibnizs-372nd-birthday)

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pilaf
I think it should be noted that this is the entire Spanish language Wikipedia,
not Spanish as in "from Spain", so this shutdown affects a lot of people
(estimated 350 million native Spanish speakers worldwide).

I haven't seen the community discussion that led to this decision, but
assuming that it was democratically decided across collaborators from the
entire Spanish-speaking world, I think gives the protest a lot more weight
than the title may suggest.

~~~
sanbor
I totally agree and it was actually the reason that I submitted it. I tried to
read something from Wikipedia _en español_ and got that even though I'm not in
Europe. Do you think that the title "Wikipedia in Spanish also shuts down in
protest at proposed EU copyright law" is better? My English is not good enough
to be certain that sentence is correct.

~~~
pilaf
What about "Spanish language Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed
EU copyright law"?

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pilaf
Translation of the shutdown text:

Dear reader,

On July 5, 2018, the plenary of the European Parliament will vote on whether
to proceed with a proposal for a directive on copyright. If approved, this
would significantly damage the open Internet as we know it today.

Instead of updating copyright laws in Europe and promoting the participation
of all citizens in the information society, the directive would threaten
online freedom and impose new filters, barriers and restrictions on access to
the Web. If the proposal was approved in its current version, actions such as
sharing a news article on social networks or accessing it through a search
engine would become more complicated; even Wikipedia would be at risk.

So far, dozens of relevant people in the field of IT have strongly opposed
this proposal - among them the creator of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, and the
Internet pioneer, Vinton Cerf - 169 academics, 145 human rights, press
freedom, scientific research and technological development organizations, and
the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that promotes this
encyclopedia, among other projects for free knowledge.

For these reasons, the Spanish language Wikipedia community has decided to
shut down all the pages of the encyclopedia before and during the vote, i.e.
until 10 am (UTC) on July 5. We want to continue offering an open, free,
collaborative and free publication with verifiable content. We call on all
Members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open
it up for discussion and to consider the many proposals of the Wikimedia
movement to protect access to knowledge, including the deletion of Articles 11
and 13, the extension of freedom of panorama throughout the EU and the
preservation of the public domain.

In other countries of the Spanish-speaking world, such as Colombia and Mexico,
the Wikipedia community has recently opposed similar proposals. We ask you to
keep up to date with their development and support this effort.

For more information on the campaign in the European Parliament and how to
act, visit
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_vote_in_...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_vote_in_2018/es).
You can follow the communication on social networks with the tags
#WikipediaSeApaga, #SalvemosInternet and #SaveYourInternet.

The Spanish Wikipedia community

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rasz
Same for Polish one ( pl.wikipedia.org )

~~~
riffraff
This is a very important comment, as it means the initiative is "snowballing".

It's a shame it's buried behind pointless discussion on whether the EU has
internet giants.

~~~
urlwolf
I'm European, and pro-EU. Yet, everyone I respect in my inner circle is
crystal-clear about one thing: EU has lost. There's US, there's CN... and a
big hole where EU should be. In technology, EU is not a contender, and will
never be. Demographics and culture prevent it. I've worked extremely hard to
change this for four years, but I have given up.

~~~
riffraff
it may be, but it's only tangentially related to the topic at hand.

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pacnard
We seriously need a (law compatible) system to punish lawmakers, in a way that
they would never even think to touch basic rights like freedom of speech.
Having a constitution or a democracy is clearly not enough. That's the next
step for a just world.

~~~
riffraff
It is arguable whether this impacts freedom of speech, and it would be argued
differently in different jurisdictions.

~~~
Kliment
It absolutely does - when this same law was implemented in Germany as a
national law it was struck down by the constitutional court.

~~~
riffraff
Germany is not all jurisdictions, that is the point.

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jwilk
It's implemented as a JS redirect to:

[https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comunicado_4_julio_2...](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comunicado_4_julio_2018)

If you have JS disabled, everything works as usual.

~~~
craftyguy
Ah, I was wondering why it looked fine to me. Disabling JS wins again!

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shujito
I have javascript deactivated on wikipedia, it doesn't redirect me to the
notice page [1]

[1]
[https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comunicado_4_julio_2...](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comunicado_4_julio_2018)

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anticensor
Obligatory xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/2015](https://xkcd.com/2015)

Upload filters would edit our posts silently and we would have no recourse.

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MikusR
The most likely result from these shutdowns is that people will just google
for what they were looking for. And in stead of more or less correct
information will get whatever shows up. (For example looking up vaccines will
get some antivax stuff)

