An interesting angle of this, which Wales highlighted, is that it was a community decision made entirely by the Italian Wikipedia's editors. Afaik, that makes Wikipedia the only top website where the <i>userbase</i> controls the website in some sort of effective, practical manner, so that it's even possible to temporarily take it down as a protest. With most other sites, it would've had to be a top-down decision of the site owner.<p>I suppose the next closest might be convincing people to mass-blank their tumblrs, but that has a certain collective-action-coordination problem.