On 14 January 2012 12:20, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
On Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:58:41 +0000, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
I think the concern will be dependent on whether Commons is covered in the blackout (and whether the 'full' shutdown goes ahead or the 'pop-up plus banners' that seems to be getting most traction on enwiki).
I'm seeing a rough consensus for action on English Wikipedia, and German Wikipedians seem to be up for acting in solidarity, but, as I've said on the page on enwiki, I don't see how enwiki consensus for a SOPA action ought to bind other proejcts including Commons and the English sister projects.
Commons most likely will only run a banner. There is currently a straw poll abut it. The blackout has not even been seriously discussed. (And I personally think it will not be a good idea because many hotlinks to Commons files would just disappear without any explanation in case of the blackout - not something which add us much credibility).
Is there talk about blackout on the files or just the pages? I don't think a blackout on Commons would have the effect you described. 'Hotlinked images' from Commons would continue to work as normal. Including images in a blackout is usually a bit more work than usual (Apache rewrite rules, etc.), while pages can simply be caught with a quick and dirty MW-extension (or even just JavaScript).