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2

I think it's great that so many companies and organizations want to make people aware of SOPA, but not having access to Wikipedia for 24 hours is really inconvenient.

I noticed that you can see the front page of Wikipedia before getting the Anti-SOPA banner, which leads me to believe it's some sort of client-side magic that's preventing people from accessing pages.

Is there a way to disable this blackout?

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18  
If you ask about solution sustainable in long term, the best way is to stop the SOPA. Otherwise the blackout will be much much longer than 24 hours in the future! Learn how you can help: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/114010/… Learn the consequences of SOPA for stackexchange: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/114005/… – Tomas Jan 18 '12 at 13:05
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Sure, there is one right way. Call your senator to stop SOPA. Or it strike back over time and for much longer than 24 hours. – Mikhail Kashkin Jan 18 '12 at 13:13
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24 hours without wikipedia access is too much to bear? Really? – Bart Silverstrim Jan 18 '12 at 14:32
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It's sad to see how many people are actively trying to circumvent getting the message about SOPA out because not getting into Wikipedia, of all things, is inconveniencing people for 24 hours. Makes me think it's not even worth contacting representatives because as long as people aren't directly inconvenienced, they don't care what is happening. – Bart Silverstrim Jan 18 '12 at 16:31
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@BartSilverstrim I think it's not that bad because the point of this blackout is to raise awareness, and the only people who will even try to circumvent it are the ones who are already aware of it. – murgatroid99 Jan 18 '12 at 17:46
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closed as too localized by Al Everett, neo, Mehper C. Palavuzlar, phwd♦ Jan 19 '12 at 7:15

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

18 Answers

up vote 72 down vote accepted

From Wikipedia, Are there ways to circumvent the read blackout?

The community has asked us to preserve emergency access options. The following methods will remain available to access content:

  1. Disabling JavaScript in your browser. This is not emergency access - this is a trivial way to disable the blackout
  2. Using bookmarklets (example) or other tools to unhide the content
  3. Visiting the mobile site at http://en.m.wikipedia.org/
  4. Accessing site content via the API
  5. Appending ?banner=none to the end of page URLs.

As noted above, the mobile site will be available, but will display a banner pointing people to ways to protest SOPA/PIPA.

Another trick that I discovered was pressing stop on your browser (or escape) after the article loads and before the banner loads can prevent it from loading too

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4  
using m.wikipedia.org is the simplest for me! – Shevek Jan 18 '12 at 10:51
I've built a chrome extension (similar to bookmarklets) that will automatically hide the blackout chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/… – jwegner Jan 18 '12 at 18:13
You can also use the Simple English version. – roviuser Jan 18 '12 at 21:52
Here's an excellent bookmarklet: jsfiddle.net/Daniel_Hug/dPC52/show/light – Web_Designer Jan 19 '12 at 0:44
up vote 21 down vote

Yes, there is! The Anti-SOPA blackout on Wikipedia is just some JavaScript trickery that can easily be circumvented.

The easiest way to do this is to disable JavaScript in your browser. This will defeat the blackout and let you browse Wikipedia without any problems.

If you'd like to be more surgical about it, you want to block the following script from running using your favorite JavaScript or ad blocker:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:BannerController&cache/cn.js&303-4

I personally use the Safari extension JavaScript Blocker to manage my JavaScript blocking needs: it uses a regex-based engine. For similar tools, you'll want to use the following regex to block access to the script:

^http:\/\/en\.wikipedia\.org\/w\/index\.php\?title=Special:BannerController&cache=\/cn\.js&303-4$

Alternatively, you can use the mobile version of Wikipedia, which does not have the blackout in place.

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9  
Don't forget about all of the offline Wikipedia options. They're good to have around in general, for example when it's your internet connection rather than Wikipedia itself that's gone dark :P – David Perry Jan 18 '12 at 5:47
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So, offline Internet options would allow us to circumvent SOPA entirely??! Woah! – Konerak Jan 18 '12 at 13:30
I'd argue disabling JS is definitely not the easiest way as it requires use of an uncommon menu and can affect other websites. Best way is to use the mobile site for today, which doesn't leave any settings for users to forget about. – Ben Brocka Jan 18 '12 at 15:47
up vote 20 down vote

Press the Esc key before the blackout loads.

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7  
I am not that fast. – Daniel Daranas Jan 18 '12 at 10:09
+1. This is really simple, and doesn't require you to be fast at all. On OS X with Chrome, I just refresh the page CMD+R, followed by hitting ESC twice. – kba Jan 18 '12 at 15:11
up vote 11 down vote

A bookmarklet was created to remove it.

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Here's a good one: Missing your wikipedia articles? – Web_Designer Jan 19 '12 at 0:49
up vote 6 down vote

Set your browser to disable javascript for http://en.wikipedia.org.

For example in Chrome:

Go chrome://settings/contentExceptions#javascript and block javascript for http://en.wikipedia.org.

enter image description here

This override can easily be removed tomorrow.

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1  
Other browsers have JavaScript blacklists too, this solution is not unique to Chrome. – Caleb Jan 18 '12 at 9:12
@Caleb Yea I realised that lol, edited. – Pacerier Jan 18 '12 at 9:14
up vote 4 down vote

Use a mobile browser.

The site loads just fine on my smartphone. There's a small black banner at the top of every page, then the normal page follows.

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up vote 4 down vote

You can use the Google cache version. Paste the URL into Google, then click on the ">>" next to the first result, and then click "Cached". Alternatively, if you are using Chrome, add "cache:" in front of the URL: cache:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-up_resistor

Also if you don't know the specific URL then search from google including "inurl:wikipedia" in the search terms, then look at the cached version.

This option means that you don't have to disable javascript on the other sites which may require it.

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up vote 3 down vote

Simple solution way too many complicated ones here:

in the address bar type:

javascript: $("*").show();

Wikipedia have just hidden all their normal content with javascript and since they use jQuery, it's a simple solution to shed some light. Forget the complicated stuff, this is quick and easy.

EDIT: Non- Firefoxe browsers only unfortunately, FF doesn't allow you to run JS from the address bar, (you could do it with firebug though)

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That doesn't work. FF 9.0.1 here. – Mehper C. Palavuzlar Jan 18 '12 at 9:19
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This won't work, you need to hide the actual SOPA overlay too. Also, you are better of using $("body").children.show(); so the site still functions normally. Although it is now more effective to rewrite requests to include ?banner=none... – Tom Wijsman Jan 18 '12 at 18:08
up vote 2 down vote

Try this userscript.

This script will allow you to access english section of Wikipedia during its SOPA Blackout day.

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up vote 0 down vote

Press Stop on your browser after the page has loaded and before the blackout appears.

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That doesn't work. FF 9.0.1 here. However, ESC works as @Dave states. – Mehper C. Palavuzlar Jan 18 '12 at 9:20
up vote 0 down vote

Also note that the Android App Wapedia still works, and presumably the Apple version too.

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up vote 0 down vote

Yes. It is possible.

If you use firefox go to tools->options.

In the options dialog box in Content tab ,

Uncheck Enable javascript in the left side

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How does this differ from other answers? Notably - webapps.stackexchange.com/a/22919/310 – ChrisF♦ Jan 18 '12 at 13:48
up vote 0 down vote

As the SOPA blackout is a combination of CSS and Javascript, in addition to disabling Javascript, you can also disable stylesheets instead if you would rather.

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up vote 0 down vote

If you use Firefox, there's NoScript. It keeps other nasty stuff out, too. Enabling JS for wikipedia made things look VERY different this morning.

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up vote 0 down vote

For any browsers that allow you to manipulate the DOM (firebug in Firefox, F12 in Chrome), you can remove or hide the "#mw-sopaOverlay" element and change style.display to 'block' for #mw-page-base, #mw-head-base, #content, #mw-head, #mw-panel, and #footer (only #content if all you want is to see the article). Some browsers won't allow you to access document, but this will work in Chromium at least (use it in the URL bar):

javascript:document.getElementById('mw-sopaOverlay').style.display='none';document.getElementById('content').style.display='block';undefined
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up vote 0 down vote

One alternative is to use a Wikipedia mirror, like this. Thanks to an open and free licensing of content, anyone can download the raw data and set up their own mirror.

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up vote -2 down vote

There is a blog post that explains how to do it here: http://blog.andrewpearson.org/2012/01/how-to-bypass-wikipedia-sopa-pipa.html

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10  
Best to quote the relevant information here to prevent link rot. – phwd♦ Jan 18 '12 at 7:54
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Just in case the blog decides to censor itself for the rest of the day... :P – Matthew Read Jan 18 '12 at 15:58

protected by Community♦ Jan 18 '12 at 16:39

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