Wikipedia Offline Today: Here's How to Work Around It

Wikipedia is offline today as a protest about legislation proposed in Congress that the website's officials believe would stiffle the online encyclopedia's freedom of speech—but that doesn't mean you can't get information from it.

Here's how:

Just do a Google search for what you're looking for. If a Wikipedia link pops up, roll your cursor over the link and arrows will appear in a gray box just to the right of that link (they look like this: ">>"—or see the illustration of a Google search result attached to this article).

A box on the right will pop up with a miniature version of what the Wikipedia article looks like. In blue letters near the top of the box will appear the word "cached." Click on that word. Google will give you the cached version.

What you'll get isn't the Wikipedia Web page itself, so you can't edit it, but it is an exact replica of the page from the very recent past.

The Mashable website has this article on other (mostly more complicated) ways to work around Wikipedia's blackout. It also mentions a simple workaround: Just use your cell phone and go Wikipedia's mobile version: en.m.wikipedia.org.

Connecticut's former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, now with the Motion Picture Association of America, a group which supports some of the legislation Wikipedia is protesting against, "irresponsible" and even an "abuse of power."

What do you think? You can here.

Editor's note: This article originally was published at 11:49 a.m. The timestamp was changed for layout purposes on the Darien Patch homepage.