Italian Wikipedians go on strike to protest national law, motivate change

Italian Wikipedians, Over the past 2 years, the Italian legislature has been steadily moving towards passing a law nicknamed "the blog-slayer", which would require publishers online and offline to broadcast a correction if someone they reported about demanded it -- regardless of the accuracy of the original information. They would have to publish the correction within 48 hours, in a similar place and as visibly as the original information was published.

Considering the fines for non-compliance, this would cause many people to stop blogging about anything possibly controversial. It would have even more drastic effects on collaborative sites such as Wikipedia.

After discussing how to protest this situation, Italian Wikipedians decided to "go on strike".  They updated the javascript of it.wikipedia.org two days ago to redirect all visitors to a letter explaining the problems with the pending law, and how this could destroy the Italian project. They kept this message up for 48 hours, the same timeframe that would be mandated by the law.  It was covered widely in the international press.

This protest drew over 270,000 likes on Facebook in those 2 days, one of the most rapid protests in modern Italian history.   And the legislature responded - with a number of amendments proposed (but not passed) within a day that would exempt blogs and shared websites from the law.

The intensive discussion about how to handle a critical situation, and the outpouring of support from across Italy and around the world, were a perfect example of viral wikilove. The Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Serbia, and a number of other community groups all published letters of support for the community action.

We will find out later today what the final outcome is, when the legislative session decides on what language it will pass. The community is currently planning to restore normal read access to the site around 1800 UTC.

La WikiGuida di Wikimedia Commons

Last year, Wikimedia Italia developed a delightful video tutorial for using Commons.

Se conosci Wikipedia, magari ti sei chiesto dove staranno tutte quelle foto e animazioni che illustrano le voci... La risposta è Wikimedia Commons, un unico archivio multilingue di file multimediali che fornisce immagini a tutte le Wikipedie del mondo e non solo!  Speriamo che questa "WikiGuida" sia apprezzata [e] migliori la percezione e l'uso di Commons...

If you are familiar with Wikipedia, you may have wondered where all the pictures and animations are found... the answer is Wikimedia Commons, a unique multilingual repository of media providing images to all the Wikipedias of the world and more! We hope that this"WikiGuide" is appreciated and helps improve the use of Commons...

The same team has made a Wikipedia guide, and is planning UPDATE: has now published one for Wikisource.  Below is a repost of a review from Brianna Laugher's All the Modern Things, dating from it's original release. 

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Lest anyone miss this, I thought I must post it – it’s a video explaining and showing Wikimedia Commons (Italian with English subtitles):

  

This is so well done! Ben fatto, Wikimedia Italia! I can’t imagine how long it must have taken to plan the text and choose the images. The text is nicely concise, doesn’t belabour any points, and is quite comprehensive – from OTRS to Meet our photographers … I thought it was quite funny at first, seeing the narrator in the menu on the left, but it is a nice way to see him and also see lots of colourful images. :)