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I can see the need to remove advertising or self-promoting articles from a source trying to be neutral, but this isn't just what is happening in some cases. My pet example was an article on DKP (or Dragon Kill Points), which is a concept from MMORPGs. (I reposted a version of the article on Wikinfo.) I referenced the article quite a bit as an MMO designer, usually sending links to people so they can read up on it. It was a really well-written, interesting, and useful article in my work.

In this case, a particular person wanted the article deleted, initially because of notability reasons. The first vote was to keep the article after some people, including myself, stated that the concept was, in fact, notable. A few months later, the same person brought up the article again for deletion, citing lack of references. Of course, this is a system that was developed internal to MMORPGs, so most citations are going to be websites describing different systems. Not good enough, the person stated, and the final vote was deemed "undecided". Less than a month later, the article was brought up again (different person this time, but the original person still voted to delete), and the article was finally deleted when most of the people who had argued before weren't watching.

Yes, I agree, the article didn't have proper citations and references. But, the concept is something that has been created over the last few years entirely on the internet. It's not like Ben Franklin wrote about DKP in his papers so people could reference that. I think that this is precisely what Wikipedia's strength was: containing useful information that wouldn't pass muster in a paper encyclopedia. This particular article wasn't advertising, someone's conspiracy theory, an obscure vanity page, or anything stupid that should be kept off Wikipedia.

Anyway, it's frankly frustrating that people with very little knowledge of the area can come along and repeatedly request the article that experts in the field consider useful. I don't have time to go babysit an article just because some administrators want the article deleted for whatever reason they can dig up. Therefore, for me, Wikipedia has lost a lot of it's usefulness. So, yeah, definitely past the peak in my opinion.

I mean, it would be a shame if students could just go to some other site that carried the exact same articles.

Willy One Wheels, COO of the Wiki division of GNAUK ltd, (UK subsiduary of GNAA) has successfully vandalized Wikinfo, the POV Wikipedia rip off.

Full press release here!

Thank you for your funny post. I had a good laugh. Just in case anyone thinks any of your points have a trace of connection to reality, I'll adress them:

- Big Bang: I know this is difficult to understand, but, as time is a feature of this universe, wondering what could happen "before" the Big Bang is just nonsense. There is no "before".

- Earth "fine tuned": This is known as the Anthropic principle. To say that the universe is what it is in order for us to be here is the same as to say that the surfers in Hawaii prove that the waves and the beaches of Hawaii where created for them to surf, because if not they wouldn't be so suitable for surfing.

- Life could not have appeared in Earth: maybe I'm too simple, but I don't understand how can you say that this whole universe was fine tuned in order to support life on Earth and at the same time that life on Earth could not come into existence as the result of this universe. Henry Ford created a system to get cars to come into existence, and they were produced without him needing to act in the actual process. Surely your creator could do better in a universe created all by himself just for the purpose of life.

- Information as proof of intelligent design. Actually, the more we know about genetic code, more things we find that any competent designer could not have made: a high percentage of code meaning nothing, redundant information, bad information (that translate into illness) that is difficult to delete due to the characteristics of the system...You seem to confuse information for communication. Information have no purpose, and require no actors. Is a property of any system, related to enthropy. Communication is transmission of information, requiere actors, and gives a purpose to information.

- Fossil record: no transitional forms? have you been in any Natural History museum? You could have seen transitional forms between fish and amphibian, between dinosaurs and avians, and of course between apes and men, just to name a few.

And what should be more disturbing to you, we have found that THREE species of humans coexisted 75.000 years ago: homo sapiens (we) in Africa, neanderthals in Europe, and erectus in Asia. You should think a little bit to justify why your creator allowed these other intelligent human beings to exist at the same time as homo sapiens for thousands of years just to be later substituted by us. And please remember that neanderthals were able to produce art, and they buried their dead ones.
Just another thing: try to explain convergent evolution by creationism. Please give an explanation as to why your creator would create ichthyosarus and 50 millions of years after they dissapeared would create dolphins.

I've reciently come across a fork of wikipedia wikiinfo. How do you feel about this, good thing, bad thing? Does it indicate signs of problems in wikipedia?

I don't know how much energy it would take to crack the Earth in half. But it's interesting to calculate how much it would take to "blow it out of existence", which could be loosely defined as a big enough explosion that all the bits can acquire escape velocity, and so can never recoalesce back into a planet.

The gravitational binding energy of the Earth is U = GM^2/R, where G is Newton's gravitational constant, M is the mass of the Earth, and R is its radius. Plugging in the appropriate numbers (see Wikipedia), you get 2.24x10^32 joules. For reference, if a ton of TNT is 1 billion calories (4.184 billion joules), then that works out to be 5.35x10^22 tons of TNT, or about 50 trillion gigatons. By way of comparison, I think I read that the world's nuclear arsenal at the height of the Cold War was somewhere between 20 and 50 gigatons.

Actually, that's an urban legend; ARPA funding of the ARPAnet had nothing to do with protection against a nuclear attack. They just wanted a more efficient way of linking the various academic and commercial computing centers they were funding.

What is true is that before that, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation did conceive of many of the ideas of the Internet, and he was trying to think of a more failure-proof system in case of nuclear attack. However, his ideas were largely ignored at the time. They were rediscovered after ARPA had already begun ARPAnet development for entirely different reasons.

For more on the history of ARPA's involvement with the Internet, see here (search for "nuclear"), as well as here.

If you try saying that Alan Colmes isn't liberal (besides brilliant), then you either have your head up your ass, have never heard of Alan Colmes, or simply have blind hatred of Fox News

Alan Colmes is the Sean Hannity's equivalent of the Washington Generals. He's a punching bag who's put up there to make it look like a contest. Al Franken skewered Colmes in his book Lie and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I suggest that you read that before trotting out Colmes as evidence that Fox is not biased.

The idea of a free, online encyclopedia was one whose time had come. The FSF made an announcement of the GNUpedia, but eventually endorsed the Wikipedia. Reading some of Richard Stallman's thoughts in the announcement gives some good ideas about how to make the project work.

ibiblio has started a project recently called Wikinfo. They have a very similar look to the Wikipedia and even link to it for articles they don't have, but they have adopted a different editorial policy. Specifically, they have chosen to use a sympathetic point of view.

The idea of a free, online encyclopedia was one whose time had come. The FSF made an announcement of the GNUpedia, but eventually endorsed the Wikipedia. Reading some of Richard Stallman's thoughts in the announcement gives some good ideas about how to make the project work.

ibiblio has started a project recently called Wikinfo. They have a very similar look to the Wikipedia and even link to it for articles they don't have, but they have adopted a different editorial policy. Specifically, they have chosen to use a sympathetic point of view.

The idea of a free, online encyclopedia was one whose time had come. The FSF made an announcement of the GNUpedia, but eventually endorsed the Wikipedia. Reading some of Richard Stallman's thoughts in the announcement gives some good ideas about how to make the project work.

ibiblio has started a project recently called Wikinfo. They have a very similar look to the Wikipedia and even link to it for articles they don't have, but they have adopted a different editorial policy. Specifically, they have chosen to use a sympathetic point of view.

Wow, you used a word I didn't know: occidental :) Had to look it up...

...knowledge is not out of reach anyways...

I disagree. Most knowledge costs a ton of money. I actually live in an occidental country (Canada) and when I was growing up, there was only one place to look for free or cheap knowledge. I'm working class so paying for books all the time is kind of too expensive. Perhaps for the middle class and upper class, it isn't a big deal. The only place to find knowledge was libraries. With the assault on public socialist institutions by the capitalists (capitalism calls for privatization of everything, including libraries), it wouldn't suprise me if public libraries are privatized within my lifetime. When that happens, the only place to get free knowledge is the internet.

Websites like wikipedia.org are the last refuge of knowledge-seekers that are "poor". With that scenario, I think sites like wikipedia.org have enormous potential to transform society. Do not assume the impact of wikipedia.org (which is apparently expanding to include dictionaries and stuff) is minimal. I always point people towards it when people need some quick overview.

Moreover, Wikipedia is not the only one of a kind. Why saving this one and not the others?

Wikipedia.org is the BEST and most through one I have found so far. If you know of other FREE encyclopedias let me know. I know there are some commerical ones but they might dissapear any minute. I mean, I have no idea how sites like dictionary.com and encyclopedia.com make money, and it wouldn't surprise me if they close down soon. It is imperative that knowledge remains free (although that is a losing battle in a capitalist society).

The only other encyclopedia that comes anywhere close to wikipedia.org is Internet-Encyclopedia, which is very similar to wikipedia.org since it uses the same software and is similar*. There aren't that many encylopedias on the web. Having said that, I still recommend Microsoft Encarta to everyone. That is the best and wikipedia.org comes nowhere near that. For less than $100, you can get an amazing encyclopedia with multimedia content (wiki sucks when it comes to its lack of pictures, sound files, etc). But when it comes to free encyclopedias, wikipedia.org is the only one that matters. Commercial encyclopedias also won't let you quote stuff so if you are not a member you can't link to them from a message post (for example)

(* Side note: It is interesting how internet-encyclopedia.org varies from wikipedia.org. The difference between the two is (apparently) internet-encyclopedia.org articles are written by those SYMPATHETIC to the topic, while wikipedia.org isn't like that. Which is the better approach? )

Sivaram Velauthapillai

From Internet Encyclopedia, however:

"After overrunning these countries Germany turned against France, entering the country through the Ardennes on May 13 - the French had made the fatal mistake of leaving this area almost totally undefended, believing its terrain to be impassible for tanks. Most Allied forces were in Flanders, anticipating a re-run of the World War I Schlieffen Plan, and were cut off from the French heartland. As a result of this, and also the superior German communications, the Battle of France was shorter than virtually all prewar Allied thought could have conceived. It lasted six weeks, after which France surrendered."