Wikimedia Blackout and How It Works

(source: wikimedia)

Blackout Implementation
Wikipedia has blacked out their English Wikipedia in protest to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). All of the politics aside and disregarding where I stand on the issues, I wanted to see how it was implemented.  The answer: Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX).

Why Distrupt The Cause
It is not my intention to disrupt the cause at all.  My curiosity stemmed from the question: how will they adjust their server configuration to redirect all traffic or build one simple object without affecting their site metrics?  All they did was implement a post-load appended script that erases the content output by pHp and then asynchronously loads the blackout page.  This way crawlers still see what they need to see and people still arrive where they want to arrive, they just get blacked out.

How To Get By
It is simple.  Keep your cursor by the stop button for your address bar when you hit enter for navigating to or searching in Wikipedia.  When you hit enter, immediately hit click the stop button and it will keep the AJAX from loading the blackout.  So if you need to get through for some reason, there you have it.  But do keep in mind the reason and statement Wikimedia has for this event.

Stephen J Barker, Sr
Founder, Solutoci (blog)