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Its the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.REM
Your worst fears have come true, the internet has come to a screeching halt sorta. For a whole day, as part of the anti-SOPA protest, there will be no Wikipedia, no Reddit, no MoveOn.org, no Raw Story and no BoingBoing. Thats practically the entire World Wide Web, but lets be honest, Wikipedia is the one youll probably miss the most, and you found this article Googling for alternatives to Wikipedia.
Todays internet blackout conundrum is like trying to find restaurants open on Christmas Day, they exist, but youre probably going to have to eat Chinese food.
All is not lost, as Twitter is expected to be fully functional today. But if youre a student, Twitter likely wont help you finish your essay thats due in an hour. Where can you find a working encyclopedia today?
The Alternatives To Wikipedia
Wikipedia Wait, I thought Wikipedia was shut down today? Actually, you can still access their database through their mobile site or turn off Javascript in your browser, or use Google cache to access articles, which may or may not be up-to-date. Mediaites Phillip Bump has created a site where you can search the cache at http://pbump.net/wiki/. And Inside Cable News directed users last night to block http://wikimedia.org if youre using Firefox and NoScript and BANG! Youre back in!
Everything2 A pre-Wikipedia database of everything but mostly anecdotes, no neutrality and no power to edit, which is what some attribute to its failure to compete with the more successful free encyclopedia. Still a great resource. The Seattle Monorail has only one stop article pretty much captures the essence of the site.
Encyclopaedia Britannica has 120,000 articles that are accessible with a 30-day free trial.
Scholarpedia is a site in the spirit of Wikipedia, but each article is authored by a top expert who is sponsored by two existing curators and then peer-reviewed and validated by two independent curators. This Weeks Hollie Clemence says if youre researching computational neuroscience its perfect, but looking for the capital of Kosovo and youll need to search elsewhere.
Citizendium is an online encyclopedia that argues it exists because we can do better than Wikipedia. It criticizes Wikipedia as an amateurish, disconnected grab-bag of factoids, with no coherent narrative rife with errors and bias, and is part anarchy, part mob rule. In other words, Citizendium really hates Wikipedia. The site hosts 16,153 articles at different stages of development, of which 155 are expert-approved.
Conservapedia offers an encyclopedia that doesnt allow liberal bias. No other encyclopedic resource on the internet is free of corruption by liberal untruths, the site boasts.
The Free Dictionary Encyclopedia is compiled from a number of sources, including Wikipedia content.
(Correction: Fark and CraigsList are still accessible through a link from a homepage advocating against SOPA)
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