Draft law could take Wikipedia offline in UK | Hacker News Reader

Draft law could take Wikipedia offline in UK

theregister.com

33 pointsvixen998 comments

Regardless of the draft law, why not just sync the data locally via P2P anyway? They already have apps. We all used to use offline encyclopedias in the '90s.

The entirety of Wikipedia's text is only 21.23GB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ASize_of_Wikipedia

Maybe they'd need to raise less in donations if people kept a copy locally or it shipped on their device in the first place?

It appears that it’s a thousand times larger, if one includes the media.

I did state "text", which is the thing that carries the bulk of the knowledge, diagrams notwithstanding.

In most cases, the media isn't adding much value. Do I need to see half a dozen photos of a public figure just because I want to see their filmography? Nope. That's a management issue.

Equally, why can't the media be fetched on-demand P2P? It seems absurd that people commonly use apps for everything but Wikipedia. Only 50m downloads on Play Store.

Photos of famous landmarks, planets, equipment, animals, anatomy, artifacts? Maps?

I wish Wikipedia had more media, not less.

So, why couldn't it be delivered P2P on-demand if the rest of it was?

I'm sure it could, I was just taking issue with your dismissal of non-text media.

I'm glad to hear Wikimedia making press announcements against this terrible bill.

However, why have Wikimedia said nothing about the other big news this week? The EU has decided that Wikipedia must conform to its Digital Services Act. This isn't a proposed bill, it's something that affects Wikipedia immediately.[0]

The DSA imposes a wealth of restrictions and requirements on Wikipedia. Wikimedia really did not like the proposed DSA when it was announced.[1] Is it now all OK, Wikimedia approves unconditionally? Too busy sticking fingers up at the UK gov?

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/google-runs-5-of...

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/11/16/the-digital-...

Their issue with the UK bill is the required data collection of users. The Digital Services Act is more about requiring them to more clearly state what profiles are being collected, how they are being used, and provide mechanisms for reporting illegal content.

Looking through the Wikimedia blog post you linked, it looks like the final DSA takes most of their problems in to account?

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