GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The 3.8 billion pages in English published by Wikipedia will not be accessible Wednesday, the Wikimedia Foundation that runs the site has announced, in protest against pending US legislation that it believes will seriously damage the free Internet. “The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the US Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia,” the group says on a web page.

The decision was a tough one to make, given Wikipedia’s insistence on remaining neutral about information, it points out. But the largest-ever Wikipedia online discussion, involving some 1,800 “Wikipedians” or volunteer contributors to the site, agreed. Sue Gardner, the foundation’s CEO, writes that  “although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.”

Last three cars of the Glacier Express that crashed 23 July 2010

Sion, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The 23 July 2010 accident on one of Switzerland’s most popular tourist attractions, the Glacier Express, was due entirely to the driver having an inexplicable blackout, the federal public transport specialist who has overseen the investigation told Sonntags Blick magazine.

There was no pressure on him to accelerate too soon to make up lost time, nor were there technical problems with the train or the rail line. The 34-year-old driver told his employer, the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn line, that he had a blackout at the moment he accelerated from 35 to 56 kph, against company regulations.

A Japanese tourist died when the train derailed in the Goms valley, and 42 people were injured.

Background story, GenevaLunch, 24 July 2010

Power has been restored to much of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil after the two cities experienced four hours of electrical blackout. The power outage, apparently caused by transmission problems at a hydroelectrical station at the Itaipu dam, also briefly affected neighbouring Paraguay and, for longer, nine of Brazil’s 27 states. MCNBC reports that the dam is the world’s second largest, after China’s Three Gorges dam. The blackout is raising concerns about the country’s management of its electricity infrastructure, with recent accusations that earlier accusations that smaller blackouts have been caused by hackers, and with worries that power problems could be a problem in the runup to the 2016 Olympic Games.

Links to other sites: BrazzilMag, MSNBC, Shanghai Daily