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?
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.
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.
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.
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?