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You mean social conservatives like these? If anything, that would probably make it even more popular with them as an off-label prescription...

Well, yeah, that's as good a list of examples as any, but I don't mean to pick on the Republicans per se. Though the Republican party does have more than it's share of FSC's, FSCism can and does cross party lines. Which is why we should worry. A potentially effective vaccine for a horrible disease that affects tens of millions of people worldwide, including, yes, innocent children, and mark my words, some fuckwit social conservative will bitch about it because it might keep gays from getting sick and dying.

unless the fuckwit social conservatives manage to derail it because it might lead to "...an increase in sexual activity..."

You mean social conservatives like these? If anything, that would probably make it even more popular with them as an off-label prescription...

Bush also didn't inherit an enormous national debt from a previous administration, did he? No, I do believe he started out with a surplus... The sad thing is, somehow, the far right has managed to cloud the issue by calling into question the surplus, and, what's worse, spread the untrue and utterly ludicrous notion that Bush reduced spending. They mysteriously pull a few cherry-picked and sometimes completely fictitious numbers out of their hat, and *WHRRRR-CHUGA-CHUGA-CHUGA-CHUGA* there goes the spin machine, hard at work.

What's interesting to note is the record of debt between the two major parties, going back all the way to the Kennedy-Johnson era. Neither party has been stellar, but it does seem an awful lot that during the periods of the so-called "fiscal conservatives" have actually been some of the highest debt periods our nation has had. Care to explain that?

This is all off-topic anyway. This is an article about freaking India and their space program, ergo, the wrong place to start a squabble over US politics.

Already exists:

Hippie Liberal Douche wiki

You don't know me very well. ... Bush committed many illegal acts. I do hope that he and those in his administration that acted illegally, will be prosecuted.

Would "Deep Throat" have been caught if the actions taken in recent history were in place then? No. He was a very careful man. Not surprising, considering he was the Deputy Director of the FBI. ... I don't agree with the blatant disregard for the US Constitution and laws that have been broken by our administration, but I do recognize the fact that some rules are going to be bent for the greater good. On the scale that the laws have been bent and broken, I honestly don't believe a "greater good" has come of it.

If we are going to follow our Constitution and laws, there is no wiggle room. I know precisely how W. Mark Felt "covered his tracks" during the Watergate fracas. He initiated an investigation on who the leak may be and made lots of noise about that. But had the Nixon administration a record of his phone calls and the content of those phone calls to Bernstein and Woodward about when and where they would meet next, Felt would have been cashiered.

In other words, it was Felt's anonymity that allowed him to blow the whistle and Felt knew he had to protect that at all costs.

I lived through the Nixon era and I knew people who were being spied on by the administration. This was an administration that was bent on keeping its secrets and it kept them only slightly less well than did the Bush administration.

Bush went after reporters because of the Valerie Plame leak. And then, when Congress realized that a law was broken when Scooter Libby told the media about the identity of an active CIA agent, the coverup ensued.

But the whole issue was not national security (which was the rationale for Bush's claim of Executive Privilege) it was nasty "I'll-get-you" politics. You cannot rationalize any need for "bending rules" here, but you can clearly see how the Bush administration desperately wanted to monitor the press so that they could anticipate needs to cover things up.

The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal made things even worse. The Bush administration's policy of allowing (actually promoting) torture of persons in US custody became readily apparent to everyone. The Bush administration immediately classified everything about the prison and the US operation of it and proceeded to perform a very careful "witch hunt" for those low-level soldiers who were involved. The classification was essential to prevent anyone from knowing about Blackwater's involvement as well as military and CIA involvement in this horrid treatment of mostly "average joes" picked up off the streets of Iraqi cities in random sweeps.

The administration was overjoyed by Specialist Lynndie England's involvement as well as her affair with Charles Graner because it added sexual escapades to titillate the press corps while they covered up the "Copper Green" interrogation orders encouraging this kind of abuse by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

So you can see why the Bush administration didn't like the press. They were exposing specific, classified malfeasance of the administration. And this administration was dedicated to winning re-election at all costs.

Again, this is about politics, not national security.

No, I don't know you well. But I like your comments to the /. community and I have read some of what you have written. I have been in the news business for 25 years. As someone whose phone and e-mails may well have been regularly tapped, I feel personally assaulted by an administration bent on keeping the press from reporting the truth of their criminal malfeasance. I don't and won't "give them a pass" "for the greater good."

Given that Dan Rather is retired, Keith Olbermann is an admittedly biased political commentator, and Daily Kos is a self proclaimed "Democratic...partisan blog", I don't think it's fair to compare it to something that uses the phrase "Fair and Balanced" as a trademarked slogan.

I'm pretty sure Fox still goes around using slogans like "fair and balanced" and "we report, you decide".

Or because Rupert Murdoch was clever enough to notice that there was a lot of outcry against "liberal media" and that he could make bank by selling "conservative media". In reality, Fox is biased towards making money. If you look over the Murdoch media empire you see things like topless "Page 3 girls" in Murdoch-owned The Sun and edgy, decidedly not-conservative sitcoms and cartoons on the Fox TV network, because Murdoch is, rather than being devoted to unbiased journalism or even conservative propagandizing, an expert at finding unfilled niches within the media and filling them.

Also keep in mind that the TV market itself is becoming skewed. It's no longer a safe assumption that everyone watches TV. The middle-American evangelical types watch more TV than urban left-wing progressives, so it's obvious which news bias will get higher ratings.

It is interesting that you say that Armitage did not commit a crime. I think I might agree if he was just repeating what the administration was cooking up as a smear. Did he hear from Grossman about Libby's interest in Wilson's wife? Did he read the actual document marked secret before speaking to Woodward? He may not have known that Plame was covert at that time though he should have. By the time he speaks with Novak though he should be pretty much aware that the information is secret. On the other hand, Wilson warned Novak that it was indiscrete to go around blabbing on July 10 http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Plame_Leak_timeline #July_10. Novak then speaks to Libby on July 11, presumably tidying up. Does he ask Libby if Libby knows that Plame is covert? That would be pretty standard practice. Novak certainly sends a copy of the article to Rove for approval. With that kind of editorial control, Novak is just an organ and it is a Libby-Rove show orchestrating the outing. They are also releasing other classified information at the time to assist with the smear which Libby insists is authorized, so he is being careful about that at least.

This action of the president is unfortunate since after a few months in jail, Libby might have been willing to talk. Miller finally did. But, perhaps the president's motive is not alleviating too harsh a sentence but rather disuading Libby from talking. In that case, the president's action would be an attempt to obstruct justice.

Just because Miller was involved in the story too doesn't mean Libby was the leak.

Miller never printed a story about it, she didn't disclose anything. No leak. And according to her statements, She doesn't exactly claim Libby came right out and said her print this either.

Bob Woodward was the first to get the name. This time line should be helpful in keeping the facts straight.

Now it should be noteful that While bob woodward and judith miller knew first, they didn't publish anything until after Robert Novak did. Novaks article was the effective outing that is causing the stir. Both Noval and Woodward got thier information from Armitage. Libby was interviewed by woodard after the armatage situation but before Miller. Could be a reason why it was there, then again, it could be something else.

For one: You might as well have linked to any DailyKOS page saying the Jews did WTC. Seriously. Democracy Now thinks so also.

Controversial 9/11 Diaries

DailyKos accepts that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by agents of Al-Qaeda. It is forbidden to write diaries that:

      1. refer to claims that American, British, Israeli, or any government assisted in the attacks
      2. refer to claims that the airplanes that crashed into the WTC and Pentagon were not the cause of the damage to those buildings or their subsequent collapse

Authoring or recommending these diaries may result in banning from Daily Kos.

Of course DailyKos is an avowedlypartisan site. And while it might be the case that most DailyKos readers might be happy to see KSFO shut down, Spocko is not one of those who is listed as a representative of the site (see the link), and in fact acted until recently as a lone gunman, documenting the hate speech emanating from that station and drawing it to the attention of its advertisers all by himself. This effort only came to the attention of the DailyKos community _after_ his personal site got SLAPPed by Disney/ABC. He's not even a regular DailyKos blogger, though he does have an account there, and someone else entirely drew the community's attention to his plight. Consciously or not, your entire post explicitly invokes the "guilt/honour by association" logical fallacy (and what the hell is wrong with the Guardian by the way?). Just because it got reported on DailyKos doesn't make the story false.
 
Tony.

...and I'm sure that if he hadn't recently passed away, one of my state's Democratic ex-Congressmen (Gerry Studds) would be interested as well.

Why does this have to be a partisan issue instead of a cut and dry, "creepy old man" issue? Furthermore, what does this have to do with the BSA and the MPAA? Jeez.

Threaded media are useless for political debate, for exactly the reason you suggest: any worthwhile question will be crapflooded by those who consider it against their interests to discuss.

The kind of post-by-post deletion or moderation you have to do for a debate thread necessarily becomes censorship when you have to decide if a post that contains a few relevant sentences and a few irrelevant, can be retained or not.

Accordingly, you need third person statements and the kind of contract that prevails in a wiki: version control is sacred and attribution is strict, but no one has sole control of any sequence of words that will appear to the reader, that's only collective.

In other words: absolutely no one other than the administrators who create the buttons, frames, form prompts, has sole control of even so much as a full sentence on any topic/issue page, even if they created it and solely authored it. All they have a right to is accurate attribution and quoting, just as they would if a third party journalist had written a story about the topic.

So the wags who say "impossible" are correct that it's impossible with slash or civicspace or yahoogroups or opengroups or newsgroups or mailing lists. If it is possible at all (not saying it is) it would have to be on a wiki base. And that's borne out by all the good meaty political stuff that's on wikis now: dkosopedia, sourcewatch, wikocracy, anarchopedia, openpolitics, Living Platform, consumerium. And quasi political wikiscience like embodimentwiki and administrative gurudom like let.sysops.be.

Threaded media are useless for political debate, for exactly the reason you suggest: any worthwhile question will be crapflooded by those who consider it against their interests to discuss.

The kind of post-by-post deletion or moderation you have to do for a debate thread necessarily becomes censorship when you have to decide if a post that contains a few relevant sentences and a few irrelevant, can be retained or not.

Accordingly, you need third person statements and the kind of contract that prevails in a wiki: version control is sacred and attribution is strict, but no one has sole control of any sequence of words that will appear to the reader, that's only collective.

In other words: absolutely no one other than the administrators who create the buttons, frames, form prompts, has sole control of even so much as a full sentence on any topic/issue page, even if they created it and solely authored it. All they have a right to is accurate attribution and quoting, just as they would if a third party journalist had written a story about the topic.

So the wags who say "impossible" are correct that it's impossible with slash or civicspace or yahoogroups or opengroups or newsgroups or mailing lists. If it is possible at all (not saying it is) it would have to be on a wiki base. And that's borne out by all the good meaty political stuff that's on wikis now: dkosopedia, sourcewatch, wikocracy, anarchopedia, openpolitics, Living Platform, consumerium. And quasi political wikiscience like embodimentwiki and administrative gurudom like let.sysops.be.

If you want to shift the debate at issue on the fly, look at debatepoint.com, it lets you shift the point under debate as a basic function. However, issues tend to stabilize based on certain principles people think are important and persistent briefings on issues are important.

So once you have gone over the issues a few times you may discover you have to stabilize them into something like an openpolitics.ca type issue statement. If you want to do this on American issues right now try looking at the FrameShop methods from dkosopedia. Looks like it's based on the George Lakoff model. The issue organizing is from work dating back to the 1970s.

However, there are asshats there too. For instance, people just trying to enforce neutral naming conventions have actually been blocked by jerks who think they "own" pages or issues and can control their presentation. How such people are mistakenly given sysop powers on a political site, hard to say, but all such sites have growing pains.

There are also pretty serious biases just because of American media and the people who participate in English. It's hard to find a single political service in America where you can question Zionist occupation of Palestine without some form of harassment and exclusion by technical means. In Arabic of course it would be the other way around. Probably you have to debate in French to get anything like a neutral treatment of that issue, and the French would have strong feelings on things like Algeria and Lebanon. In any political site the systemic biases of who participates are going to rule what is said. Any "majority rule" system like rankings will drive off any minority however outspoken. So most of what is done on commercial sites and in software like slash just doesn't cut it.

Neutral point of view ideology just won't work in politics. NPOV is about moderating out extreme opinions and leaving only what can be stated in some mutually agreed terms. There's no way a political debate could work that way, you need contrast and dialectic tension between the extreme positions.

Accordingly a Multiple Point of View (MPOV) convention like metaweb.com or openpolitics.ca or some of the pages at dkosopedia.com use, is required. There can be a neutral issue statement but after that everything is a "position" that can be stated the way its supporters want it stated.

A political party needs a sympathetic point of view convention something like wikinfo.org uses.

NPOV is made into a religion by some of the Wikipedia cultists, who refer to Jimmy Wales as their "GodKing". It sounds like they're joking, but they are not. NPOV always tends to a dictatorship of the most powerful administrator.

I hope everyone was this angry when all the previous presidents did the same thing, or when this FISA BS was passed.... http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Warrantless_Eavesdr opping_Timeline

The story you linked to includes zero references to previous presidents authorizing surveillance of Americans without warrants or other judicial-branch oversight.

I hope everyone was this angry when all the previous presidents did the same thing, or when this FISA BS was passed.... http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Warrantless_Eavesdr opping_Timeline

pretty interesting discussion here:

http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Terrorism

A liberal wikipedia apparently-- first I've heard of it.

Nice idea, and if it were any other president, I'd agree. But after witnessing George Bush attaching a bogus "signing statement" to John McCain's anti-torture law basically saying he won't torture anyone unless he wants to, claiming he has the right to conduct warrantless surveillance on international calls despite a law to the contrary, and refusing to acknowledge that he doesn't have the right to do so for purely domestic calls...do you really think that such a provision would make the slightest difference to the fascist criminals currently running this country?

I'd like to see such monitoring restricted to Republicans only, given that they seem to have issues with this sort of thing.

So that's basically it, there is a spectrum of categories from where Wikipedia works well and has reliable information (mathematics, history and technology categories) to where it is just edit wars that get worse and worse (society and history categories). Wikipedia is fairly reliable about what ideas Godel had about mathematics, Wikipedia is completely unreliable if you are interested in reading about say France's Front National or Vietnam's National Liberation Front. Wikipedia has not gotten better over the years in this regard, it has gotten worse. There are left wing wiki encyclopedias like Demopedia, Dkosopedia and Anarchopedia, and right-leaning ones like Wikinfo, and I predict over the coming years these alternative wikis will become quite large.

One recent example I can give, one guy just popped up who is accusing virtually every left-wing or liberal person in the 1950's was a Soviet spy, and by virtually everyone I mean editing hundreds of biographies and inserting that they were spies. Doing this is fine if done in the right way, but he is a bit nutty or stubborn or whatever and he has a dozen people reverting his stuff but that doesn't do much good. Then we have Lyndon Larouche followers come in as well. Or way out communists saying nutty things. Wikipedia would probably be better off if these people all went off to their own respective wikis.

I see the larger problem with Wikipedia in that it is run by a millionaire, Jimbo Wales, who has said he manages it according to the philosophy of Ludwig von Mises. And the powers-that-be who have a hand in shaping rules, what content gets in, which users get banned, follow on some level from this.

While anyone can contribute, in a democratic fashion, there is a counter-force to this, in the same manner that the US is a democratic republic, with a counterforce of an authoritarian financial hierarchy, with landlords and tenants, moneylenders and debtors, company owners and workers. In the same manner, while anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, the "cabal" as they themselves mockingly call it, headed by Jimbo Wales, and with his various lieutenants in Arbcom (the Arbitration Committee), on the Mediation Committee, as bureaucrats, as admins, exercises a great deal of change over things, and points in the direction things will go.

There is a project on Wikipedia whose premise is that the English Wikipedia users are mostly from England and its former colonies and they have a certain view of the world. Plus demographically the users are generally people like me, white male professionals from the US and whatnot. Wikipedia says it is "neutral point of view" on topics like Palestine and Israel, the US vs. the USSR and that sort of thing, but that's BS. But anyhow the "counetring systematic bias" project mainly works on things by spending time writing articles about stuff most white male professionals from the US don't spend much time thinking about, like culture in Burundi and stuff like that.

Wikipedia does very well in it's top categories of mathematics and science, because most everyone is on the same page about these things. Wikipedia completely falls apart in terms of neutrality with things like the John Kerry and George W. Bush pages. They are not neutral. And it has not gotten better, and I am not Panglossian about the worsening situation, unlike the Wikipedia core group. It is obvious to me that the main categories that experience massive edit wars and fights like history and society, will eventually break off into different wikis. The most hardcore John Kerry people will go to one of the wikis, the most hardcore Bush people will go to another wiki. Then these groups might draw more people. This has already happened to some extent. And I tell people - don't bang your head against a brick wall. See how these things will not work out for you on Wikipedia, then go check out a wiki encyclopedia run by either a conservative (wikinfo) or by liberals (dkosopedia or Demopedia). And if all you're interested in is looking up articles on Wikipedia in quantum mechanics - well then, you'll probably be happy with Wikipedia. And I'm sure all the non-political people would love to see all the fanatic Air America listeners and Fox News watchers leave (actually that's being mild, communists and fascists are the real ends of the extremes that exist on Wikipedia).

Wikipedia's is owned by a millionaire who is a big fan of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises and so forth. This should begin to give you an idea of where it's head is at. He has appointed people to positions of power like admin, bureaucrat, arbitrator, and mediator, more often of a like mind then not. One of these people is part of the far-right Moonie cult.

Then we have the natural bias of an English-speaking audience of people mostly from England and its former and current colonies (the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia etc.) On top of this, the editors tend to be male, white, professional and whatnot. That this bias exists is recognized at a high level. But what is done about it? Most editors who are of more of a say world-view than US/UK-centric view, left than right and so forth are persecuted. Most left-wing admins have been persecuted - Secretlondon (sent a nasty e-mail by Jimbo Wales), 172, and Everyking. There are a few more who are more moderate, some have privately told me more recently that Wikipedia is going bonkers in this respect, that the inmates are taking over the asylum.

I believe wikis can survive only with cooperation. A wiki, like Slashdot, can survive mostly good users and a few vandals. But when say 30% of Wikipedia is left-wing, with 70% being right-wing or what in the US would be called centrist, you have a problem that is not going away. It just gets worse, really.

My prediction is that since wikis need cooperation, the controversial categories (history, society, life) will break off into separate wikis - right-leaning ones like Wikinfo and left-leaning ones like Dkosopedia or the even further left Red Wiki.

This is inevitable. The edit wars over the Israel/Palestine pages mimics the actual war going on. The arbitrators are just becoming more and more overburdened over time, and these sections are becoming more and more chaotic and sectarian. On the other hand, articles about scientific and mathematic concepts like quantum mechanics are doing just fine. I think eventually, Wikipedia itself will see the wisdom of the Kahanists and jihadis leaving for their own respective wikis. It will be better for everyone.

Wikipedia may look open and mutable at first, but it is not. Most people learn this the hard way, get discouraged and stop contributing to wiki encyclopedias altogether. I am/was very involved in Wikipedia over the past year, and say this from experience. Hopefully the painful frustration around this discovery will not prevent people from contributing to wiki encyclopedia's other than Wikipedia. Unfortunately, most people begin getting frustrated, think they can beat the system, then disappear from Wikipedia and every other wiki encyclopedia altogether, which is unfortunate. Even Wikipedia administrators like w:User:172 and w:User:secretlondon have been badgered off of Wikipedia, not to mention a host of users.

While Wikipedia itself will always be the way it is, articles are licensed under the GFDL, which is one positive thing. Unfortunately, most of the articles are garbage. Even the well-written articles have other people come in later and introduce the same bias you can find in the corporate media. It is like gold surrounded by dung. If I transfer a Wikipedia article to another wiki, I almost always use an old version of it, before people came in and started modifying it.

Good wikis to check out are:

• Infoshop's OpenWiki - a general wiki with an anarchist bent (and run in an authoritarian fashion)
• Anarchopedia - a general wiki with an anarchist bent (and run in an anarchic fashion)
• Sourcewatch (was "Disinfopedia")- a good progressive wiki with a focus on think tanks, lobbyists, public relations firms and so forth
• dKosopedia - a "left/progressive/liberal/Democratic" wiki
• Demopedia - the "liberal/progressive" Democratic Underground's wiki

I urge you to contribute to these wiki's for historical, political, economic and other such subjects as Wikipedia is hopeless for these topics. The views reflect the owner's, which is as it almost always is. Thus, you will feel better building the new society within the shell of the old in these other places, where you will be part of a welcoming instead of hostile community. And of course, especially since Wikipedia uses the GNU FDL, continue to contribute to pages on the w:brontosaurus and such, but realize that Wikipedia will always have biased historical articles, and trying to fight it is pointless, the deck is stacked against you. We'll write our history on these wiki's, the conservatives will write theirs on Wikipedia and other wikis, and that's how it is.

I am confused as to why you were reading it before. Anyways, they have a Day Pass (watch one ad and get in free to all content for a day). You can use the day pass every day (just like Jeff Gannon and the White House press conferences). So you don't actually have to pay.

Just as the concept of "reporting" was revolutionized by the invention of the Gutenburg Press, we are witnessing another change, who knows if these changes will be better or worse... At least it'll be better than a Town Crier!

Is Talon News run by "legitimate members of the press?" It does not look like it: CNN report

It's a slippery slope if the courts are the ones deciding who is/is not "allowed" protection as a journalist. If this case is to be used as a precident, why not bring James Guckert and the White House staff et. al. to justice for setting this up?

People opposed to the Bush victory in 2000 claim that ChoicePoint may have aided in voter disenfranchisement.

*This is not an endorsement of the linked site or the opinions expressed there. I just recall these claims from a Slashdot submission I made a couple years ago related to this.

As far as pages pertaining to say Israel and Palestine, I think quality control is hopeless. I am perfectly happy to get into flame (or revert) wars on Wikipedia, but even I'm scared to go into that section. Different people have very different views on certain historical and political issues. I do not mind the idea of some kind of peer review for scientific articles, but I would be very suspicious of such a process related to say the Israel and Palestine pages, or the Northern Ireland pages, or the George W. Bush and John Kerry pages and so forth. Wikipedia already have administrators who are ideological fanatics. I'm thinking of four of them right now - two are hard-core right-wingers, one is a social democrat (Americans would say liberal) who is nonetheless fanatically anti-communist, and the other is far-left.

I don't believe objectivity exists in historical and political matters. Wikipedia incorporates the now public domain 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, and some of the material in there would appear biased, racist, sexist and so forth to our modern eyes. English Wikipedia is mostly comprised of citizens of England and its former colonies, including the US. Relative to the half of the world living on less than $2 a day and whom have never made a phone call, these are relatively privileged people, and Wikipedia is a subset of even these people since Internet users and Wikipedians are more likely to be college-educated than from some ghetto or even a blue-collar household. This alone makes for a very elitist and skewed view of the world. For example, in the 1950's, there were lots of accusations in the US that the Bandung Conference was some kind of communist ploy, which in my opinion is far removed from reality. A person from India or some other third world country would have had a more realistic view of this I think. Then again, the rest of the world has some odd ideas about the US, perhaps they watch Baywatch, Friends, and shows like that and think that is what life in the US is really like.

The link in the article to Wikinfo is a fork of Wikipedia, one run by a right-wing Wikipedia user who thinks Wikipedia is too left-wing. There are forks by left-wing people who think Wikipedia is too right-wing by left-wing users as well - the "liberal Democrat" DKosopedia and the anarchist English Anarchopedia and Infoshop's OpenWiki. Wikipedia articles are GFDL so forks are easy.

Wikipedia should be able to handle science articles on biology and so forth, although speciality forks might appear by people who realize the Man's conspiracy to cover up the reality of orgone energy (please consult Robert A. Wilson). More likely, people will realize Wikipedia pages on the Israel/Palestine conflict will always be in flux depending on the time of day, and will go off and start wikis pertaining to primarily politics and history and other social science types topics. But outside of what touches upon the social world, Wikipedia should be able to handle it.

It's the people who hate democracy:

See here for more

And yes, I know it's a partisan site, but it's just collecting news stories, look past the commentary.

As far as entries on this or that, Wikipedia may be fine. As far as articles about history, news, or politics, there is a very heavy American bias, in fact it is basically a white collar American's view of the world encyclopedia.

For example, the entry for "East Germany" (before a friendly editor came across it) opened with: "East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist satellite state of the former Soviet Union which, together with West Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990 in Germany." One wonders why it would be said on the East Germany page that it was a "satellite state of the former Soviet Union" and someone of that point of view would not say that West Germany was a satellite state of the USA.

It just presents a very upper middle class American view of the world. Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners are always in the wrong, the US and Israel is always right. All socialist countries, from the Eastern Europeans to the Chinese to Latin American ones and so forth, are all bad, while the US was spreading freedom and democracy around the world, from Vietnam to Chile. In fact, most of the history of countries comes from the CIA Factbook, the US State Department, or even the Overseas Private Investment Corporation like the "History of Colombia" article. That gives you an idea of what this history is grounded in.

Anyhow, it's become apparent to me and other people that this is just the way it is, and will be as long as Jimbo Wales runs it and his cabal controls it. There are alternative wikis out there such as Infoshop Open Wiki which is a wiki where a "people's history" of the world is beginning to be written. There are also other good wikis like Disinfopedia which deal with lobbyists, PACs, PR firms and so forth.

I think this is just something we learned after a long time on Wikipedia seeing how it was this way, and despite anyone supposedly being able to edit and a supposed neutral point of view policy, the inability of that to exist since there is a cabal of administrators trying to keep their point of view on top. If you want to read a history of the world not written by the US State Department, I suggest looking at the nascent efforts of Wikinfo, Disinfopedia, dKosopedia, Infoshop Open Wiki, and other alternative GFDL corpus access providers.

• .."why should I trust Wikipedia, it's written by random people"?
• .."there's been a successful experiment of inserting false information..."
• "the neutral point of view doesn't work"
• "it's just an encyclopedia .."

Please read this:

Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.

Article review

Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page which is in active use.

These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki, our free wiki software.

We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.

There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.

Neutrality

The Neutral Point of View is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.

There's Wikinfo, which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia and dKosopedia, which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.

We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database and get going.

It's more than an encyclopedia

The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates Wikip