Tomorrow, January 18th, is the day that the web goes dark. Or some of it, anyway. As part of an organised protest, Wikipedia, among many others, is going to switch off. So where can you get your information from? Here are some alternatives…
Wikipedia is going dark for the day in an effort to raise awareness of the proposed PIPA bill that threatens to strangle the web. You can read all about the threat here.
If you just need some info during the blackout, check out one of these fine online knowledge banks:
A professionally put-together online encyclopedia that, unlike Wikipedia, won’t ever have any erroneous info or dodgy references. The downside? It’s not, strictly-speaking, free. EB demands a yearly subscription.
That said, there is a free month’s trial available. Assuming you’re fine to type in all your info and then remember to cancel the subscription, the info’s yours for the taking.
Infoplease is a solid body of info from trusted sources such as the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. It’s all free, and there are some nifty tools built in like a calculator and periodic table.
Because it’s not crowd-sourced, the info on each page isn’t quite as detailed as the things you’d find in Wikipedia, but that’s just us being picky.
A fairly similar offering to Wikipedia, this – but thats probably because it was started up by Wiki co-founder Larry Sanger.
The general idea is that, unlike Wikipedia, everything that goes up has to be given a once-over from one of the site’s editors before it gets properly published. Unchecked info is there, but it’s heavily suggested that you should take it all with a pinch of salt.
If you’re reading this on the 17th, you still have time (if you’re so inclined) to download the entirety of Wikipedia to a hard drive and use it offline.
The download is 8GB when compressed, but unfolds to somewhere in the region of 5 Terabytes if you want all the pictures and videos. Head to WikiTaxi to get going. Now.
