Without Wikipedia, going gets tough for Pune students

Wikipedia’s decision to go dark for 24 hours over the US anti-piracy legislation hit the city students hard on
Wednesday.

The website’s blackout of its English language version made it tough for youngsters to prepare for their examinations and assignments.

The website was inaccessible for the users from 5 am on Wednesday until 5 am on Thursday.

“With the bank recruitment exams and other government exams approaching, we found it very difficult to prepare for the same,” said Bhavnesh Piperiya, who is preparing for the civil services exams.

Students from various streams were of the common opinion that the voluntary shutdown is not an effective way to prove a point and termed it as a pointless demonstration that hurts
students and others who rely on it.

“It is very stressful for students like us at this time of the year because we rely on Wikipedia to do our assignments. The blackout of such a website makes our work very difficult to submit our dissertations and other assignments within the deadline,” said M Pavitra, a second-year MA (mass communication) student of Marathwada Mitra Mandal College of Commerce.

The research students too found the going tough, as they depend on the website for crucial inputs required for their research work.

“Since research is a continuous long-flowing process, we need it daily. A blackout interrupts the data collection process,” Sougata Ghosh, a PhD student at the biotechnology department of the University of Pune, told DNA.

Director of the College of Engineering, Pune, said, “If the blackout continues for long, then the students dependant on it will find it hard to cope up.”