"We're not done yet"

Wikipedia may have come back to life, but they are firm in their resolution that the fight will go on.

Along with other sites that participated in the Internet blackout on Wednesday, they are continuing the battle against the contentious Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy ACT (SOPA).

Wikipedia, along with a good 10,000 smaller sites, effectively shut down and replaced the familiar homepage with a warning to visitors about PIPA and SOPA.

Google showed its support and blacked out its main logo – other sites that showed support but did not blackout took the number of smaller sites up to 40,000 (the majority of these were on WordPress.com), according to Fight for the Future.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said that close to 396,000 people signed its online petition resulting in nearly 1.2 million emails to Congress.

"Our next action against the blacklist legislation is a call-in day to senators on Monday," said Rainey Reitman, activism director at EFF. “We've seen incredible successes in the last 48 hours, but we need to make sure this proposal is good and dead before we let up.”

PIPA is scheduled for a final vote tomorrow – hence no holding back.

Wikipedia apparently had eight million people look up the contact information for their local representative on the day of the blackout using a Wiki tool.

"The purpose of the blackout was twofold: to raise public awareness, and to encourage people to share their views with their elected representatives," said Wikipedia's message.

Awareness was raised all right - increased traffic caused ‘online rubber necking,’ during the blackout, due to users satisfying their curiosity.

Critics of SOPA and PIPA say US website owners will be forced to police their own sites in terms of copyright infringement – “They are misguided solutions to a misunderstood problem.” Wikipedia cautioned.

The bills have been weakened but not yet stopped – with the PIPA vote on 24th January, can the masses succeed with so little time left?

Reitman hopes so, “I'd like to kill this bill so thoroughly that Congress won't even think to introduce a replica."