As noted in The Guardian, "Wikipedia has taken its English-language content offline as part of a 'day of darkness' in protest at US anti-piracy laws that it says could 'fatally damage the free and open internet' and 'severely limit people's access to online information'."

So what are Web users missing?

Daniel H. Pink offered an early profile of the online encyclopedia in Wired. "Jimmy Wales wanted to build a free encyclopedia on the Internet," he wrote. "So he raised an army of amateurs and created the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future called Wikipedia."

John Broughton described the site thusly: "Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, 'Diogenes of Sinope,' or 'turnip,' or 'Crazy Eddie,' or 'Bagoas,' or 'quadratic formula,' or 'Bristol Beaufighter,' or 'squeegee,' or 'Sanford B. Dole,' and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks."

Drake Bennett assessed the site on its 10th anniversary. "The worry for some who have followed the encyclopedia over its first decade is that as the site matures, it will have a harder time attracting and retaining the volunteers who make it work. A research team led by the computer scientist Ed H. Chi at Xerox PARC has found that Wikipedia's growth, whether measured in entries, edits, volunteers, or even bytes, has been falling off for a few years," he writes. "The number of active editors and rate of article creation both peaked in 2007. The site, Chi argues, has begun to behave less like a limitless information ecosystem and more like a biological one, a world where actors compete over limited resources. Today, all the obvious entries—Aristotle, electricity, the Magna Carta, the American Civil War—have been written, along with millions more. That leaves fewer new ones to write and increases the chance that a new entry will be deleted on the grounds that it, as Wikipedia's guidelines say, 'lacks notability.'"

Maria Bustillos argues that Wikipedia portends the death of the expert. "There's an enormous difference between understanding something and deciding something. Only in the latter case must options be weighed, and one chosen," she writes. "Wikipedia is like a laboratory for this new way of public reasoning for the purpose of understanding, an extended polylogue embracing every reader in an ever-larger, never-ending dialectic. Rather than being handed an 'authoritative' decision, you're given the means for rolling your own."

And Kevin Kelly says it's a step toward socialism. "We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not," he writes. "It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now."