this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Yes. You know when you see headlines like "internet service shut off in X country amid Y event"? It's like that.
All of this is fleeting. If the govt decides to deny you access to anything online, they can and will. The only ones left communicating will be on radios. Backups of individual sites are great and all, and necessary, but they mean next to nothing on a grand scale if a government makes such decisions.
At this point in the timeline it is an eventuality everyone should be aware of.
Of course, there are economic reasons why internet access en masse probably won't get shut off at the tap(s). But it may end up being the case that true, free communication, as we think of it currently, is impossible due to restrictions on speech through automoderation, or just good old coercion through fear.
What you say is true, but doesn't really answer "Could someone take down Wikipedia [without completely shutting off the internet]". For obvious reasons, shutting internet access completely off isn't going to happen short of an insurrection or a war.
Shutting down Wikipedia specifically is much harder. As others have pointed out, there are many thousand copies of Wikipedia lying around on peoples private devices. If Wikipedia were actually taken down (blocked by the government in some sense) hundreds of mirrors would likely pop up immediately, and it would be more or less impossible for the government to go after each individual site that some person decides to host, short of just cutting internet access completely.