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Comment by knight17 | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting to me that only four of them are protesting—German, Czech, Danish, and Slovak—by blacking out their sites on 21 March 2019 in opposition to the proposed EU Copyright Directive.

Why is it that other EU Wikipedia language editions like French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish not joining in the protests? Did they come up with a different conclusion on the potential impact of the new copyright directive? Can people who know about the politics of other EU language Wikipedia comment whether they had discussed of joining this black out?

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I support their point of view and agree with their protest, but one reason against this could be the potential politicizing and weaponisation of Wikipedia. Do you want one of the largest collectives of human information to take sides (in any debate) and selectively remove its service?

I think I would prefer a banner or a landing page more as it doesn't introduce any barrier to the information they provide.

I assume Wikipedia is protesting because it directly affects them. I don't see how it's problematic to advocate for themselves sometimes.

Because it is expected that they are as neutral as possible. People should advocate for encyclopedias, but they should not have opinions themselves. That impression can be argued to be wrong, of course.

Well, it is explicitly stated in the linked statement that

> “Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, [but] its existence is not.”

You might disagree with that position, but if you expect Wikipedia as a platform to be neutral, you have not been paying attention.

> Do you want one of the largest collectives of human information to take sides (in any debate) and selectively remove its service

When that debate is about access to that information, definitely, yes.

The point is well taken that doing such things should be rare and done very carefully.

You feel this isn't one of the cases when it's necessary?

The parent's implication being that this is one of the cases where people could reasonably believe it isn't necessary.

Yeah and I am asking explicitly because it seems unbelievable and I'd like to hear why.

As each Wikipedia project is independant, there's not really any cross-wiki communication and the guidelines can vary quite a bit.

But I would not have supported this, I just don't believe these kind of a stunts are effective, just annoying to users. Everybody already has copyright-directive-warning-fatigue. If you must you can put up a banner.

> Everybody already has copyright-directive-warning-fatigue.

If that is you experience, I think you might be living in a bit of a bubble (as we all do, arguably). Anecdotally, I know quite a few people who seem to be pretty unaware of the whole discussion.

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