Top 5: Sites to visit during the Wikipedia blackout!

So the mother of all information websites has been blacked out for a good 24 hours. Here's a list of sites you can visit to cross check all your details, do your research and submit that project you've been sitting on till the last minute.

When a site like Wikipedia decides to impose a blackout on itself, you better have been prepared for it or start looking for alternative options.

The folks at Wikipedia are protesting against two bills -- the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) -- that they say will harm the free and open Internet if they are passed.

According to the website, the 'current draft of the bills (requires) for US-based sites to actively police links to purported infringing sites. These kinds of self-policing activities are non-sustainable for large, global sites -- including ones like Wikipedia'.

Having said that though life does become somewhat difficult when Wikipedia isn't around.

Here are some sites you could visit for your research during the next 24 hours.

Some of us may remember those times -- much before Wikipedia came along -- when we'd load CDs and DVDs of Encyclopaedia Britannica on our PCs and wait in anticipation as the drive whirred and opened up the world before our eyes.

The encyclopaedia's website -- britannica.com and its Indian version britannicaindia.com still does a pretty good job of throwing up updated information at the click of a button.

Even though, what you see at first will just be an abstract of a longer article, you can subscribe to their free seven-day trial and hope that Wiki doesn't go for another blackout on the eighth day.

WolframAlpha calls itself a 'computational knowledge engine' with a goal to 'make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone'.

According to the website, wolframalpha.com aims 'to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything'.

So when you hit 'India' as a search query you'll get all the major statistics about the country -- from its area and population to the current inflation rate and just where it ranks in the world in the Human Development Index.

Pretty basic you may say but when you have a college deadline to meet and no Wikipedia, you really don't have a lot of options you know.

And oh, just in case you were wondering, according to WolframAlpha, India stands 95th in the world for its living standards, 103rd in health and 111th in education.

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