Wikipedia pages should get a lot quicker very soon as the foundation behind the world’s largest and most popular encyclopedia have turned on Lua, a lightweight scripting engine, to speed up access to complex pages. And the site is asking its editors and contributors to learn the new programming language to help make the site quicker.

Those who have ever edited Wikipedia pages will know that the site, like many wikis, uses “Wikitext language” — a sort of a simplified HTML — to enable users to add content chunks, templates, and formatting to a page.

But there was a problem, as Wikimedia’s Sumana Harihareswara posted recently:

But because we’d never planned for wikitext to become a programming language, these templates were terribly inefficient and hacky — they didn’t even have recursion or loops — and were terrible for performance. When you edit a complex article like Tulsi Gabbard, with scores of citations, it can take up to 30 seconds to parse and display the page.

Lua is an embedded scripting language, built so that lightweight but powerful code can be embedded right into web pages. It’s often used as a scripting engine for games. And it’s much quicker than Wikipedia’s existing wikitext solution.

The big question is, of course, is how Wikipedians will take to the new language, which is unfamiliar and potentially more complex than wikitext. And will we start encountering bugs on Wikipedia pages as editors and maintainers now become programmers?

“Now is the first time that the Wikimedia site maintainers have enabled real coding that affects all readers. We’re letting people program Wikipedia unsupervised,” Harihareswara wrote. “Anyone can write a chunk of code to be included in an article that will be seen by millions of people, often without much review. We are taking our “anyone can edit” maxim one big step forward.”

And, she added, that if any Wikipedia user doesn’t look the load time of a page, they can now do something about and improve it themselves, in a very Wikipedian way:

“Just as we crowdsourced building Wikipedia, now we’re crowdsourcing bits of infrastructure improvement. And this kind of massively multiplayer, crowdsourced performance improvement is uniquely us.”

The read-write revolution continues.

photo credit: Stewart via photopin cc

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Marcus Thielking is cofounder of Skobbler, a provider of mobile map-based solutions that use OpenStreetMap data.

Map lovers, 2012 was our year.

From Apple unveiling and then apologizing for Apple Maps, to the emergence of the collaborative and crowdsourced OpenStreetMap, for those fascinated by digital mapping technologies, 2012 was a critical point in time. And with location-based services powered by map data expected to reach 1.4 billion users by 2014, you can bet the innovation and competition we witnessed will continue in 2013.

So, what’s next? Here are the top five moments I expect we’ll see in the digital maps space in 2013:

1. OpenStreetMap gets better

With over one million contributors to date, a number that has doubled approximately every 14 months since 2005 and shows no signs of slowing, the OpenStreetMap — affectionately known as the “Wikipedia of maps”— is quickly becoming one of the most popular mapping platforms on the planet. And, the more users lend the project their location expertise, the better OpenStreetMap’s data will ultimately turn out to be. In fact, today, OpenStreetMap has already become the most detailed digital map available in countries like England and Germany. With its ever-increasing user base, the data can only continue to improve. This is hugely important for developers seeking to build their own location-based products and services.

Beyond just being cost effective, OpenStreetMap delivers levels of detail, accuracy (beyond just the street networks) and flexibility not possible with some of the more traditional map players. As the platform advances thanks to user growth, developers in need of mapping data will continue to abandon relationships with guys like Google Maps, TomTom and others, integrating OpenStreetMap data into their own offerings.

2. Apple Maps will get better, too

Apple Maps has been categorized by many as the company’s largest black eye (at least recently). Not only did the app suffer from a data issue, but it was clear the company didn’t have the right team in place building the product, as it couldn’t fully deliver on the fundamentals (like putting bridges in the right places). It was a colossal letdown that led to firings and public apologies, and I guess this should be the case, given this, this, or this. Here’s the thing, though, for all of the criticisms, Apple Maps will only get better.

Whether it will come internally (unlikely), or from the integration with an external mapping party of some sort (see Apple’s rumored acquisition of Waze, although, I think a company like TomTom makes more sense given their base technology and mapping talent), look for Apple to improve on its service. Google knows this and won’t stop updating its own map so as to take full advantage of its head start and ensure that its market position will remain solidified. Apple doubters remember, though – and there are quite a few doubters out there today – the company has long been a bastion of innovation in every arena, so expect the Maps product to slowly find its way back and be a very big player in 2013.

3. Google Maps will lose some of its luster

Apple Maps was the best thing ever to happen to Google Maps. Upon its release, people realized just how valuable Google’s service was through comparison. They also realized how important maps were more generally. For the end-user, the effort and skill required to produce a digital map was, for once, clear. The press for Google was unsurprisingly positive. It couldn’t have asked for a better situation.

However, a mere few months prior, the seemingly unflappable Google was the one on the receiving end, seeing negative press for Google Maps after deciding to charge high-volume users of its maps API. The moment positioned Google as the corporate entity that it is, rather than a driver of innovation. That’s when we started to see defections en masse from Google Maps to the OpenStreetMap, with Foursquare, Wikipedia, and even Apple, leading the charge. While Google has since reversed course, it’s an issue that will crop up again soon and perhaps shift the narrative – in a negative way – for Google.

4. Partnerships to differentiate

For end users interested in a great mapping experience, whether it’s for navigation, direction-finding, and the like, maps can begin to seem redundant. More competition means more mapping services, but it should also mean more originality, allowing one platform to differentiate itself from the next. Google Maps, for instance, has Street View as a feature and is rolling out 3D functionality to stand out from a flood of new challengers. However, in order to be truly unique in an increasingly cluttered space, there are more creative opportunities for map makers to take advantage of, namely through partnerships with other location-based services that are eager to benefit from the scale afforded through map services.

For instance, take Nooly, a startup that allows you to view the weather, in real-time, for any point of interest (it’s location-based via GPS and seems to use Google Maps, currently). Partnering with them and leveraging their API would provide a great end-user benefit and allow a map service to carve out a true point of differentiation relative to other players. I think we’ll see more partnerships like this throughout the year.

5. More maps to come

With mobile proliferation, maps are becoming more and more essential each day, therefore, it only makes sense that more services will pop up, and that more existing companies will want a piece of the pie (Apple entering the fray is really just the beginning). This was especially true in 2012 – think Amazon’s November announcement – and it will only continue in 2013. Could Facebook, for example, enter the mapping space? The recent debut of its Graph Search function could make that a possibility, given location’s centrality to any search platform (and, if Facebook ever does decide to move forward with its own smartphone, a map will be core to that service, as well).

Now, these are just a few possibilities I think we’ll see in the mapping space this year.

Did I miss anything? What do you think will be some of the key map moments in 2013?

photo credit: Carla216 via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Information may want to be free, but the organization behind Wikipedia wants knowledge to be free, too. So Wikimedia has formed a partnership with the world’s sixth-largest telecom, VimpelCom, to deliver Wikipedia mobile sites for free to developing countries.

It’s part of the Wikipedia Zero program, which is the project to deliver Wikipedia “free of data charges” on mobile devices in developing countries.

“The world’s sixth-largest telecommunications company and fifth-largest website globally are coming together to offer our customers a better mobile experience and greater access to free knowledge, particularly in emerging markets,” Mikhail Gerchuk, VimpelCom’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement.

You’ve probably never heard of VimpelCom — the organization typically does business under other brands, such as Wind and Mobilink — but the telecom has a strong presence in Russia, former Eastern bloc countries, parts of south-east Asia, and Africa, with 212 million subscribers in a service area with 780 million people.

With this partnership, Wikipedia Zero now will be providing free access to 330 million mobile users around the world, Wikimedia’s Kul Takanao Wadhwa said, adding that it was an important step towards the organizations’ ultimate goal: “free knowledge to everyone on the planet.”

The 18 countries that VimpelCom is bringing onboard include Russia, Italy, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Laos, Algeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burundi, Zimbabwe, and the Central African Republic.

The roll out will start this year, Wikimedia said, with a focus on Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.

photo credit: Absolute Chaos via photopin cc

Comparing what people find interesting is a fascinating cross-cultural exercise. When we want to learn more about any given topic, many of us go first to Wikipedia, which is why a report detailing the most viewed articles in 2012, broken down by language, is a revealing glimpse into different mindsets, values, and ways of life around the world.

The English-speaking world is drawn to technology, entertainment, and death. Facebook is the most-viewed page with 32.6 million views, and more than 25 million people looked up “Deaths in 2012.” Half of the top 10 centered on blockbuster films, an English-Irish boy band, and Fifty Shades of Grey.

Bad American television is apparently a significant point of interest to Europeans. Top pages in Spanish, German, French and Italian include How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Grey’s Anatomy, Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and Game of Thrones (although I consider Game of Thrones to be riveting television.) One Direction, the aforementioned English-Irish boy band, popped up on just about every European language list. I have yet to decide if my complete and total ignorance of this group is an embarrassing sign of age or a testament to maturity. Let’s go with the latter.

A majority of the highly viewed pages in Arabic are about historical, religious, and political figures, while the Russians are intrigued by Internet phenomena such as YouTube, social networks, and online porn. The Brazilians (and other Portuguese speakers) tend to look up information about sports, singers, and social networks.

The findings vary greatly across Asia by country. In Japan, the top three most popular pages are about actresses and female pop music groups. While the Chinese are primarily drawn to information about technology and business, they are also, it seems, intrigued by Japanese actresses. The Thais primarily use Wikipedia to look up geographical information, while the Vietnamese use the encyclopedia to learn about the birds and the bees. “List of sex positions” tops the most viewed pages, joined by “sex” and “genitals of women.” Naughty, naughty.

These findings were culled from the Wikimedia Toolserver, a collection of 13 servers that host the Wikimedia databases. View the full report.

Wikia’s mission is threefold. It is designed to unloose the power of knowledge as influence, enable personal and collective creativity, and distribute rich, original content. Although founded by the creators of Wikipedia, Wikia is a separate business dedicated specifically to lifestyle topics and pop culture. And unlike Wikipedia, Wikia is a for-profit enterprise that makes money off advertising.

The platform powers over 200,000 wikis with millions of pages of content. The Wikia Video Games hub is the largest network of gaming sites in the world. It contains more than 65,000 game wikis and 2.48 million pages of content. The company cites The Elder Scrolls, Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Fallout, and Runescape as the most trafficked titles. The entertainment section is also growing fast, with “super communities” coming together around A Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games.

Today, alongside closing an $11 million deal, Wikia announced that the forum feature is now available, which will facilitate discussion on the sites. The investors on the fielding are Jeffrey Blackburn of Amazon, which led Wikia’s Series B of $10 million in 2006. Also listed are previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Institutional Venture Partners. Angel investors in Wikia include major Silicon Valley names like Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Reed Hastings, and Mitch Kapor.

This brings Wikia’s funding to $25 million. Wikia is based in San Francisco. Read the SEC filing.

Get ready for banner ads and guilt trips, y’all; Wikipedia’s raising money again!

This year marks the Wikimedia Foundation’s ninth annual drive; the foundation is trying to raise a total of $25 million to be used toward keeping Wikipedia and its sister projects alive and kicking.

As the foundation noted this morning in a release, most of its funding will continue to come from grants and donations from other sources, not the annual campaign.

Funds will be used for software upgrades, more editors, accessibility projects, and a continued ad-free user experience. One of the foundation’s special projects, which focuses on better access for feature phones on sub-par mobile networks, helped to create big usage spikes in parts of the developing world, meaning that the people who need factual information most are getting it.

“Our fundraiser succeeds the same way Wikipedia does, with millions of people contributing what they can so we can keep the site freely available for everyone around the world,” said Wikimedia executive director Sue Gardner in a statement on the news.

“People tell me they donate to Wikipedia because they find it useful, and they trust it because they know it’s written for them. Our readers fund the site, which keeps us independent and able to deliver what they need and want from Wikipedia — exactly as it should be.”

This year’s campaign will use web banners to highlight a few hand-picked editors, photographers, and free-knowledge advocates, all of whom contribute to various Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. The notable Wikipedians include:

Poongothai Balasubramanian, a retired math teacher from India, has created 250 articles on quadratic functions, probability, charts, graphs, and has recorded pronunciations for 6,000 words in Tamil, her native language. “I’m a volunteer. No one pays me. But helping edit Wikipedia has become my life’s work,” she said. “Even though I’m not in the classroom, I’m still doing what I care about most: helping a new generation of students learn, in the language I love.”

Andrea Zanni, a Wikimedia Italy chapter member and digital librarian who contributes public domain and freely-licensed texts to Wikisource, said his experience with the Wikimedia movement has facilitated his self-expression and shaped his life. “Wikipedia is one of the few things that really enables people to be useful, to have an impact with a little effort,” he said. “Wikipedia is really empowering. It’s really a framework of good faith, of good will.”

Ravan Jaafar Altaie, a Wikipedian from Iraq who writes about Leonardo da Vinci and the moons of Jupiter, tells her story of contributing to Arabic Wikipedia and influencing hundreds of thousands of people through articles she’s written. “This is my wish and one of my dreams to make a real change in the world. I think Wikipedia gave me this chance to make a huge difference in this world,” she said. “It’s like an investment for your future, for your children’s future.”

Ken Thomas, a photographer from North Carolina, donates his photos to Wikimedia Commons under the CC0 public domain license. “Putting a photo on Wikipedia is an act of generosity,” he said. “I don’t own the bird. I don’t own the light. I don’t own the tree branch that the bird was sitting on. I take these pictures because I want people to see how beautiful these things are. Who am I to charge for that?”

Erlan Vega, an English teacher from La Paz, Bolivia, said he improved his English competency and earned international certifications because of his experience editing Wiktionary and collaborating with English speaking Wikipedians. “In my education system, people don’t usually write or create,” he said. “Giving me the opportunity to be creative and to be recognized for something I write has really been a turning point in my life.”

Of course, like NPR’s Pledge Week, the banners will continue to guilt-trip you long after you’ve made your donation, but you’ll feel better once you get it out of the way. Go get your donatin’ on; the world will thank you for it.

The wait is over. Wikipedia now widely supports HTML 5 video content on its millions of entries with the launch of its TimeMediaHandler, soon with support for mobile.

Wikimedia has been working on getting video onto Wikipedia for nearly four years. It partnered with HTML 5 open source video platform Kaltura in 2008 and worked with others such as Google to create the TimeMediaHandler. The TimeMediaHandler is what makes video work on Wikis. It supports the audio, video, closed captioning, other “timed text,” and is very flexible. It changes based on your bandwidth and what kind of device you are on, including mobile.

In true Wikipedia fashion, you can contribute to and edit videos you add to the site as well. That is, you can add  your own translated subtitles and add closed caption versions in your language. It represents a pretty big opportunity to expand the library of videos translated for the hearing impaired.

Full editing capabilities and mobile support are not yet deployed, however.

Of course, Wikipedia has had to do a lot of beefing up to prepare for the video. It had to ensure there was enough space to store all of the content. It also had to ensure that the process of uploading videos was an easy and quick one — otherwise no one would do it. The Wikimedia Foundation created an Upload Wizard between 2010 and 2011 to help people with just that.

The TimeMediaHandler supports open source video format WebM — a type of video that is built specifically for the web and is made to conform to your device and bandwidth. Popular players such as YouTube use WebM, which means you can pull free-licensed content from YouTube’s library to supplement Wikipedia entries.

Cat film image via Shutterstock

Created in 2005, Hudong.com calls itself the world’s largest Chinese-language wiki with 6.4 million entries. Like Wikipedia, the site houses articles on various topics and accepts submissions from the public.

At the beginning of June, Hudong.com announced a partnership with Microsoft’s search engine Bing. The partnership helps Hudong.com gain better search capabilities and gives Microsoft the chance to develop its search engine technology in other countries, which it needs to compete with Google.

Part of Hudong.com’s funding is being raised by online private investment platform Xpert Financial. Tim Draper, of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, sits on Xpert’s board and sent an email urging people to invest in Hudong.com.

Hudong is China’s leading for-profit social knowledge platform – a wiki-enabled encyclopedia that monetizes its content through advertising. China is one of the largest and fastest growing internet and mobile markets in the world.

DFJ Dragon has invested in the Series A, B, and B-1 offerings, I have personally invested in the B and B-1 offerings—as have other leading venture capital firms—and we intend to participate in the Series C offering. I would urge you to consider this opportunity.

It appears, from the email that Fortune obtained, that Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s China fund, DFJ Dragon will be raising funds for Hudong.com as well.

Chinese money image via Flickr user Martin Kalfatovic

Encyclopaedia Britannica, mortally wounded by the Web and Wikipedia, is ending the production of its print edition in favor of a strictly digital strategy, the company announced Tuesday.

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. president Jorge Cauz told the New York Times.

First published in 1768, Encyclopaedia Britannica has been printing hard copy reference volumes for nearly 250 years, though sales peaked in 1990, according to the Times.

The company is now currently selling its final 32-volume 2010 edition for $1,395, and supplies are limited. Moving forward, Encyclopaedia Britannica will only produce its rich reference guides for the Web and continue to create e-learning curriculum for educational institutions.

“Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now,” Cauz said. “The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

And yet, Wikipedia is now synonymous with the term encyclopedia, offering all walks of people free access to a not-always accurate, but always current treasure trove of editable articles.

The extremely thorough Wikipedia article on Encyclopaedia Britannica, for instance, serves as the perfect example of why Wikipedia is coming out on top. Ironically, the page could very well become the only thing our children have to remember the once illustrious Britannica by, a point lamented by VentureBeat senior editor Heather Kelly.

But the Britannica will live on in more than spirit. The company told the Times that it has 500,000 customers who pay a $70 annual fee for online and mobile access to its content.

“Today’s announcement is not about our past, but our future — and the new ways we’re serving our customers,” Cauz said.

Photo credit: Bopuc/Flickr

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had fighting words for Motion Picture Association of America chairman Christopher Dodd, calling the former Senator and current lobbyist out on his recent threats and pronouncing that the MPAA should fire its chief.

“Candidly, those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake,” Dodd said to Fox News recently. “Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

Wales argued that these transparent statements make the MPAA out to be a corrupt, Congress-buying organization. He also challenged Dodd’s assertion that Wikipedia’s decision to blackout its site in protest of SOPA, an effort Wales said was a “massive success,” constituted an abuse of power.

10 million people contacted Congress, Wales said. “That’s not an abuse of power, that’s democracy,” he said. “[Dodd] had best get used to it.”

The heated war of words between Wales and Dodd has to do with each others’ opposing viewpoints on SOPA and PIPA, two almost-dead pieces of legislation that would give the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against foreign websites associated with infringing intellectual property. Wales is so opposed to the legislation that he helped champion a web-wide protest.

But Wales told the audience at the Design Life Digital conference in Munich that he believes digital piracy is a very real problem that needs to be addressed with better legislation. “I hope to see … a window of opportunity for Hollywood to come to the table and talk to Silicon Valley with a little more humility,” Wales said. “The laws need to be tweaked … but we do not need a Draconian new regime.”

[Image via Hubert Burda Media/Flickr]

Disclosure: The Digital Life Design conference paid my way to Munich. VentureBeat’s coverage of the conference remains objective and independent.

Twenty-seven year-old entrepreneur Pavel Durov founded Russian social network VKontakte, or VK for short, five years ago. The site has grown to 33 million daily unique visitors, 17 million monthly active users and a total of 160 million registered users. VK, he said, is the reason why Facebook has yet to be successful in Russia and is the fourth most-viewed website among Europeans, according to comScore.

But Durov has an unabashed appreciation for Wikipedia and said that the site serves as a much more altruistic and important web service than his own for the larger global community. And so Durov, who finds the unpredictable financial future and fundraising efforts of Wikipedia troubling, pledged to donate $1 million to support the cause, marking the first time anyone has used the DLD stage to make such a donation.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was onstage to witness Durov’s compassionate financial vow. “How old are you?,” Wales asked Durov. I wish I could give away $1 million when I was 27, he joked.

The donation comes just weeks after the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, announced that it had gathered a record $20 million from more than one million donors during its 2011 online fundraising efforts.

[Image via DLD/Tumblr]

Disclosure: The Digital Life Design conference paid my way to Munich. VentureBeat’s coverage of the conference remains objective and independent.

Here’s how you can get the information you want and need while the Internet is busy taking a stand on SOPA and PIPA.

1. Hit the escape key as the page is loading.

This is by far the easiest and most convenient way to get to the Wikipedia pages you need. Do your usual keyword search search on Google, adding the word “wiki” to the search terms. Click the appropriate Wikipedia link; then, as the page is loading and before it goes to the default blackout screen, hit the escape key on the top left side of your keyboard. You’ll get to read the article to your heart’s content. If you mess up the timing, just reload the page and hit the escape key a bit sooner (if you’re stuck on the blackout page) or a bit later (if you’re stuck on a blank white page with no content at all).

2. Use some easy URL magic.

An intrepid reader informs us that adding “?banner=false” to the end of any Wikipedia URL will bypass the blackout page. For example, you could use the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/whatever?banner=false to see a normal wiki page on the site. Also, even on your desktop computer, you can use Wikipedia’s mobile site to get the information you need, when you need it. Just stick a well-placed “m” in the URL, and you’ll skip the blackout screen. For example, I was trying to look at the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triazolam but was stymied by the blackout. I just inserted the letter “m” like so: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triazolam and the mobile page appeared in my web browser, full of lovely information on the drug I will be taking tomorrow right before my wisdom teeth get pulled out.

3. Try it in another language.

If you’re down with other languages aside from English, sehr gut pour vous, querido. Also, if you use the Chrome web browser, you might be able to get (sometimes confusing) translations from the other-language page into English. For example, the first sentence of the page http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triazolam, when translated into English, reads, “The Triazolam is a chemical family of benzodiazepines, the half-life shorter (2:40), used as a medicine, including marketed under the name of Halcion, but also as a generic drug.” You know what they say: Plus je connais les dentistes, plus j’aime mon chien.

4. Use the Wayback Machine.

The Internet Archive may not contain the most current information available, so if you’re researching, say the Republican 2012 presidential wannabes, use extreme caution. But for more evergreen topics, do not hesitate to hop on over to Archive.org, where you can enter just about any Wikipedia URL and see a cached version of the page.

5. Use a cached URL from Google’s web search.

Google caches the web pages it crawls, so it should have a fairly recent version of the Wikipedia page you’re searching for. Just enter in your keywords plus the word “wiki,” which should yield a relevant Wikipedia page or two. Then, hover over the gray arrow to the right of the link. There, you will see an option to view the cached page. Click that link, and you’re on your way to wiki town.

If you don’t get the whole SOPA/PIPA hoopla, take some time to read up on the issues and learn why these two bills have the Internet in such a messy, blacked-out uproar.

Or, you could just watch this video of a guy singing a song about SOPA, PIPA, blackouts, and LOLcats. I’m sure it’ll be a lot funnier when I’m sky-high on Triazolam.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) have definitely gotten the Internet’s attention, but not in the good Elmo orders Taco Bell sort of way. This is more like Rebecca Black announcing she’s obtained the license to the entire library of The Beatles music.

The two bills have lovers of all things Internet immensely concerned, with many people claiming that if either one passes, the current everyday freedoms we enjoy, including unfettered access to Google, Wikipedia, and especially YouTube, would cease to exist as we know them. In reality, SOPA and PIPA target foreign websites that are pirating copyrighted content, but they do so in a broad way that most Internet experts agree would be damaging to the way the Internet functions.

The video game industry would potentially be hit particularly hard, as a major element of the gaming culture is sharing screenshots, streaming gameplay videos, and celebrating over 20 years of video game art and music. This is not only done on a consumer level, by millions of gamers around the world, but is also the backbone of all professional gaming coverage from sites like GamesBeat and countless others.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation writes, “Instead of complying with the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], a copyright owner may now be able to use these new provisions to effectively shut down a site by cutting off access to its domain name, its search engine hits, its ads, and its other financing even if the safe harbors would apply.”

Many gaming companies have taken action to protest the bills. Below is a listing of all notable anti-SOPA gaming companies and how they’re fighting for what they believe in. And don’t miss our gallery of anti-SOPA protests today.

Mojang

Minecraft creator Markus Persson announced via Twitter that he’d be taking down minecraft.net and mojang.com on January 18th to protest SOPA (the day the bill was originally set to be voted on, though that has now been delayed to February).

Persson acknowledged that a large part of Minecraft’s very viral success was due to players posting screenshots and videos of their in-game creations. Under SOPA, each and every one of them would potentially be at risk of having their sites closed down, something Persson, the legal copyright holder, obviously opposes.

“No sane person can be for SOPA,” Persson stated, speaking on behalf of Mojang. “I don’t know if we’re sane, but we are strongly, uncompromisingly against SOPA, and any similar laws. Sacrificing freedom of speech for the benefit of corporate profit is abominable and disgusting.”

Major League Gaming (MLG)

First MLG moved all 100+ of its domains off of GoDaddy, as did more than 30,000 other sites. It then announced it would be furthering its anti-SOPA stance by participating in the blackout on January 18, from 8am to 8pm ET. The entire MLG network will down during that period, and will be replaced by a short message with additional information about SOPA to “help educate our community members about the bill and what it could mean for them.”

Destructoid

Independent gaming blog Destructoid announced it will be joining in on the January 18 SOPA protest by blacking out its site, alongside MLG, Reddit, Wikipedia, and others.

Destructoid founder Yanier Gonzalez wrote, “If you think this blog post is annoying and not about videogames, wait until you can’t reach our site at all because you won’t have the power to decide what websites you can and cannot reach.”

Wikipedia

Wikimedia is not a gaming-only site, obviously, but it does play a major role in the way gaming content is spread and digested across the Internet on a daily basis. You may best know Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales from those mopey banners begging for your donations, but he’s opted to take a decidedly more fearsome stance on SOPA. “All US Citizens: #WikipediaBlackout means nothing unless you call your Senators. Do it now! Give friends the number too!” Wales wrote on his Twitter.

The English-language version of Wikipedia will go dark for 24 hours on January 18. The move is not entirely unprecedented, however, as the Italian version of Wikipedia ran a similar blackout protest in October against new libel laws.

Wales also defended the move on his personal Wikipedia page, and considered taking the blackout global as recently as yesterday. Unlike most other sites, where the decision to protest came down from on high, the Wikipedia blackout was proposed to and discussed by over 1,800 users in a 72 hour-period, with the “overwhelming majority” supporting community action against SOPA.

If you absolutely can’t cope without Wikipedia for one day, you can always download the entire site.

Epic Games

Dana Cowley, senior PR manager for Gears of War studio Epic Games, wrote on the official Epic forums to clarify the company’s anti-SOPA stance. “Epic Games supports efforts that would stop overseas websites profiting from pirating our games, but we have to do that in a way that’s compatible with freedom of speech and due process of law. Thus, we do not support the current version of SOPA.”

Cowley also noted that Epic Games is a member of the Entertainment Software Association, stating it was “working with legislators to refine the bill.” That may be sugar-coating it quite a bit, as the ESA is an organization that has come under heavy fire for its official support of SOPA.

ESA members Sony and Nintendo all quietly removed their names from a list of official SOPA supporters. This may or may not have had something to do with a petition with over 130,000 signatures telling fellow ESA member Electronic Arts to oppose Internet censorship.

Indie Gamers

Polish indie game developer Sos Sosowski, with the help of 48-hour game-making competition Ludum Dare organizer Mike Kasprzak, has put together the Stop SOPA Jam. The jam will protest SOPA on January 18 in a very unique way: by making games.

Anyone can join the Stop SOPA Game Jam by making an anti-SOPA game and uploading it tomorrow for public consumption. Minecraft’s Markus Persson has confirmed he will be participating.

Sosowski initiated the movement with a single tweet: “Let’s protest against #SOPA the best way we can! Make #antiSOPA games on January 18! Join the #sopajam! Let’s do this!”

Red 5 Studios

Red 5 Studios, the developer of Firefall, an anticipated upcoming free-to-play massively multiplayer online game (MMO), has taken perhaps the most extreme anti-SOPA stance of them. Not only will Red 5 be protesting on January 18 by shutting down its official website, but also the ongoing beta for Firefall.

“We are extremely disappointed in this misguided legislation,” said CEO Mark Kern. “We are also ashamed of the ESA for supporting a bill which is clearly not in the best interests of gamers or the game industry.”

Firefall, which was the primary sponsor for last year’s PAX Prime event in Seattle (earning promotions and a massive booth front in center during the convention), has pulled all plans for this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). E3 is (arguably) the world’s largest annual gaming expo, and is run by the ESA.

Kern stated that Red 5 is not a member of the ESA, and never will be given its stance on SOPA. Instead, Red 5 has established the League for Gamers, a non-profit alternative to the ESA with the goal of “protecting gamers and developers from anti-industry legislation.” You can read more about the LFG in GamesBeat’s exclusive interview.

Kern also noted that bills like SOPA would be especially detrimental to smaller companies “who will not have the legal resources or lobbying presence to protect themselves from unwarranted shutdown.”

Story continues on the next page.

Top image via Destructoid

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