ReadWriteWeb

Many of us take cheap high-speed Internet access for granted. I think nothing of downloading an MP3 album from Amazon MP3 while streaming a movie from Netflix on the Roku and browsing the Web on a powerful computer. That's not a luxury that's available to everyone, and in some parts of the world data charges prove prohibitive for going online for information.

To help counter that, the Wikimedia Foundation and Orange have come up with a plan for free Wikipedia access. Overall, the deal looks like a win for users, but it does raise a couple of questions as well. How is Wikipedia access going to change Africa and the Middle East?

Wikipedia blacked out its English-language site yesterday along with other major websites. It was a protest against Web censorship and a demonstration of its effects. Wikipedia's participation was a big win for the movement opposing SOPA/PIPA, the twin anti-piracy bills in Congress. Wikipedia is a resource millions use every day and most take for granted. It's the fifth most popular website in the world.

Wikimedia Foundation says the blackout reached 162 million people. Of those, 8 million used Wikipedia's tool to look up their congressional representatives. The blackout generated three trending Twitter topics when it started at midnight Eastern Time on Wednesday. Twitter also revealed frustration and lack of understanding of the blackout. But this was all by design. Censorship is frustrating. Wikipedians wanted a campaign that was both symbolic and effective, and that's what its staff delivered.

So what just happened? Well, several of the world's most prominent Web destinations interrupted their regular programming to remind their readers of the dangers of a world where certain content may be arbitrarily made to disappear. For most Americans, this was probably the first they'd seen of any efforts by Congress to change the Internet, for whatever reason they'd want to do so.

They were given links to click on to learn more. Some of those links led to the White House Web site, where over a hundred thousand people signed petitions urging the President to veto any bill that would suborn Internet censorship. A few of those links led, to our own surprise, to ReadWriteWeb; and for a few hours yesterday, our traffic rose to unprecedented levels.

The SOPA/PIPA blackout today by Wikipedia, Mozilla, WordPress.com and many other sites is (I hope) drawing attention to proposed legislation that is considered a threat to "Internet freedom." That's fine, admirable, and (with any luck) will be effective at curbing SOPA/PIPA for at least another legislative season. The backgrounders I've read so far by Wikipedia and others explain pretty well why SOPA/PIPA shouldn't pass. What they don't say is that SOPA/PIPA are business as usual, and the protest is a last-ditch effort necessary because the legislative system and mainstream media are fundamentally broken.

After several weeks of speculation and debate, the English version of Wikipedia is going to be blacked out this Wednesday to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its legislative brethren. The massive, open source encyclopedia will join Reddit, Mozilla and others in this week's show of anti-SOPA sentiment, founder Jimmy Wales announced today.

With an estimated 25 million daily visitors, Wikipedia is the largest site to take part in the blackout. Reddit, a wildly popular website with massive traffic, only garners a fraction of the pageviews that Wikipedia gets in a month, and even those page views are typically dominated by a certain subset of the Internet community. Wikipedia is viewed by a much more mainstream audience, a fact certain to propel SOPA further into the consciousness of everyday, non-geek Web users.

The Wikimedia Foundation, parent organization of Wikipedia and other super-wikis, closed out its annual fundraising campaign with another record-breaking haul. The campaign raised $20 million, about 71% of its planned operating budget this year. Donations have risen every year since the campaigns began in 2003.

Wikipedia serves more than 470 million unique visitors every month, and it doesn't pay for all that bandwidth with advertising. This annual fundraising campaign provides the bulk of Wikimedia's funding, and the rest comes from gifts and grants like the one Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki made for $500,000 in November.

The Brin Wojcicki Foundation, created by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, has given a $500,000 gift to the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia, which oversees Wikipedia and its sister sites, launched its 8th annual fundraiser on November 16. That's why Jimmy Wales is staring at you from the top of every Wikipedia page.

Wikimedia's annual spending tops $20 million, and the campaign funds a majority of its operations. So the Brin Wojcicki gift isn't a majority stake, but it's surely appreciated. The gift is not affiliated with Google directly, but it's worth noting that Google once donated $2 million to Wikimedia. As the end point of so many search queries, donations are not the only way Google supports Wikimedia's websites.

Wikipedia has fallen behind on an enormous backlog of editorial work. This has led to hundreds of thousands of articles that don't meet the community's standards for quality remaining unfinished on the site and creating a "monster under the rug" for the world's largest encyclopedia. That's the perspective of Sven Manguard, one Wikipedia community member who published an opinion piece this week on the site's community news section, The Signpost. The perspective was widely agreed upon in discussion.

"Whatever people may say about declining participation, Wikipedia still generates a lot of new content," Manguard begins. "We add articles and upload dozens upon dozens of files every day, and that is unquestionably a good thing. However, as a community, we tend to neglect a large variety of problems that have cropped up in older articles. We sweep them under the rug, so to speak, and that is unquestionably a very bad thing."

Wikipedia visitors can now leverage a new level of security and privacy regarding their reading habits, thanks to the site's newly announced support for HTTPS browsing. Ryan Lane, a Wikipedia Operations Engineer, writes that HTTPS "allows you to visit our sites without having your browsing habits tracked, and you can log in without having your password or user session data stolen." Visitors seeking to navigate the site securely can simply visit https://en.wikipedia.org to begin.

Wikipedia has made several steps away from the growing trend of encouraging users to share their data with one another, in some cases explicitly contrasting the giant encyclopedia's policies and ethos with Facebook's.

Opening Google Plus to everyone gave them a tremendous traffic boost. With a 1269% increase in visits, Plus traffic increased to 15 million U.S visits, up from 1.1 million the week before. That news, plus Facebook's re-design, the Kindle Fire launch and a look at a very cool Wikipedia QE addition, rounds out our top stories this week at ReadWriteWeb.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Google Plus, Facebook and Kindle Fire - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.