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In the hours before the blackout hit, coders and bloggers alike scrambled and many succeeded in finding ways around the anti-censorship protests on sites like Wikipedia, Reddit and Wired. Now that everyone's had the chance to tinker with the sites, more details are emerging about the real effects of the blackout. Chief among them, because Wikipedia editors can't access the pages they need to update the English language site, Wikipedia's community has been silenced. Not only can you not easily read Wikipedia, editors can't write. This is going to make Thursday a very busy day for diehard Wikipedians.

"There's never been so little activity on English Wikipedia as far as editing -- there's a handful of admins who are handling that," Wikimedia's Jay Walsh told The Atlantic Wire. We asked for more specifics about how activity has slowed, expecting to hear that edits were down by some arbitrary percentage. But it was much more than that. "This is pretty wild," Walsh said, after clicking through to check the stats. "The only article that's been significantly changed is one of the SOPA articles. Normally we would be sending tens of thousands of edits over the course of a day on Wikipedia." And while even Wikipedia doesn't know about all of the holes in the Javascript-powered firewall, they otherwise think it's pretty solid. "As you can imagine it's not a hack we want to use on a regular basis, [but] it's pretty well designed," Walsh concluded.