Re: [Dbpedia-discussion] SOPA, Wikipedia, and dbpedia

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 9:26 AM, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
> On 1/17/12 10:01 AM, Jörn Hees wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 17. Jan. 2012, at 15:08, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>>>
>>> On 1/17/12 8:39 AM, Mischa Tuffield wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Following on from the news that the English Wikipedia is going dark in
>>>> opposition to the SOPA/PIPA tomorrow (2012-01-18) given the activity in the
>>>> US [1], I wonder whether we as the Semantic Web Community feel like we
>>>> should turn around and turn off dbpedia? What do people think? Wouldn't that
>>>> be a nice show of support to Wikipedia, dbpedia's parent project, I think so
>>>> ...
>>
>> Note that en.wikipedia.org won't be "turned off", they will have a black
>> click through page before being able to access articles.
>> While ok (for me) for pages intended for humans, i don't know if it's wise
>> to do the same for machine accessible data.
>
>
> In the case of DBpedia that means: /page/ links can do similar.
>
> As for the machine vs human matter, SOPA doesn't make any distinction. Same
> really applies to Linked Data, its all about representation formats for
> structured data via description oriented directed graphs.
>
>
>> The machines will get confused.
>
>
> That's part of the point.

Except that most machines don't understand SOPA, and won't call their
representatives. Although SOPA (and PIPA) affect machines, too, it's
the humans that can affect whether the legislation passes. So it's all
about informing humans with the hope that they'll take action.

When Wikipedia goes black, there will be information on WHY it has
gone black, and what SOPA means to internet users.

If the data portion of DBPedia goes black, there will be no
information on WHY it has gone black and there will be no mention of
SOPA, so there will be no action taken on the part of humans. Yes,
humans eventually see the data that the machines get from DBPedia, but
if the data portion of DBPedia goes black, the applications that use
it as a datasource will probably just say DBPedia is down, or that
data is unavailable; no mention will be made about SOPA.

Bryan

Received on Wednesday, 18 January 2012 15:49:35 UTC