Iβm sure the government can do anything they wantβ¦ but a lot of people have it backed up including myself
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Yeah, I assume if they took down Wikipedia itself then hundreds of copies would pop up all over the place, probably hosted elsewhere, and one of them would become the primary replacement over time.
Media might be lost to some extent, but I doubt there's any way you can take the text/information/metadata off the internet at all, and that's the most important aspect.
Yes they could in several ways but not without causing massive upraw.
They could put financial pressure on Wikipedia by making payment processors stop working with them like they did with Wikileaks.
They could get ICANN to pull their domain. (I doubt ICANN will do it though)
They could tell ISPs to stop resolving Wikipedia's domains on their name servers.
Authoritarians don't care about what the hoi polloi think.
Yes, but 1000 mirrors will pop up immediately if that happens. Internet is hard to control. They canβt even stop torrenting sites which is mostly used for piracy.
Yes, it's possible. Any system built by people can be destroyed by people.
Now, of course, there would be a reaction. What specifically that would be I can't say. I'd like to think it would cause serious blowback, but I'm also pretty jaded and don't really have that much faith in people all the time.
Or more generally, anything that has a beginning has an end
Unlikely. They have data centers in several locations all over the world, and there are countless backup copies downloaded onto personal devices everywhere.
Probably same would happen as with TPB.
The most likely to happen is that the current administration starts censoring internet content within the US. The information would be deemed dangerous, or whatever other justification they think would work. The site itself would still exist, we just wouldn't have legal access to it any longer.