Survival Tips, Wikipedia Alternatives for the 24-Hour Blackout

It's only 24 hours yet people are panicking, and it would be good to search Wikipedia for the answer to this question: what are Wikipedia alternatives to use during its 24 hour blackout?

Frankly, in the old days, you could pull up Encarta or some other DVD-based encyclopedia. Guess what? Wikipedia killed Encarta, with Microsoft giving up on the DVD-based program in 2009.

So with Wikipedia blacked out for 24 hours as a SOPA / PIPA protest, what are some Wikipedia Alternatives?

The best Wikipedia alternative, in our book, is Wikipedia itself. What that means is you could use The Free Dictionary's encyclopedia, which is basically a mirror of Wikipedia, but one with (sob) ads. Just as with Wikipedia, you can search within the site for topics. However, once a query is resolved, you must make sure to click on the “Wikipedia encyclopedia” tab to read Wikipedia's content. The default result is a dictionary / thesaurus "definition" for the search term.

Speaking of turning to Wikipedia itself, one of the targets of SOPA and PIPA is The Pirate Bay, and it ironically has an unofficial (English) Wikipedia torrent file, current as of this year. Included in the torrent is a copy of WikiTaxi, which is an offline reader for the Wikipedia articles. Be sure to follow the instructions on TPB's page after downloading (but remember, torrents may take some time to download).

You could also try Wolfram|Alpha, the computational search engine. You can get a lot of information there, but not with the same level of detail most are used to from Wikipedia. Still, a search there will turn up enough information for use, and in one way it's better than Wikipedia: it's verified, not entered by "just anyone" as on Wikipedia.

Citizendium is "the citizens' compendium of everything". It is an English-language wiki-based free encyclopedia project launched by Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001. It is similar to Wikipedia, but was founded with the intent of increased reliability by forcing everyone to use their real names, and also by using "editors" to both guide and verify information.

That old standby, Encyclopedia Brittanica has an online version at http://www.britannica.com/. While underused compared to Wikipedia, it used to be the gold standard. Ah, but those articles only give you a portion of the text, for free. To access the full text, you must become a member (which costs money, right?). The fact that the blackout is only 24 hours gives you a cheesy out, however: you can use the no-risk free trial, and cancel once the blackout period is over.

Indeed, somewhat bad, since you're taking advantage of the site, but hey, just remember: it's only 24 hours.

Good luck on surviving.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

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