Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Hits 300,000 Articles
Raul654 writes "Today Wikipedia reached the 300,000 article mark. Wikipedia is a 3-year-old non-profit project to build an encyclopedia using WikiWiki software. All text is licensed under the GFDL. It has everything that a traditional encyclopedia would, but also many things that would never get written about, such as Crushing by elephant and the GNU/Linux naming controversy. For size comparisons, the English Wikipedia has 90.1 million words across 300,000 articles, compared to Britannica's 55 million words across 85,000 articles. (All the languages combined together reach 790,000 articles.) For much of the first half of 2004, Wikipedia's growth has outstripped server capacity - however, the shortage of PHP/MySQL developers is probably the biggest long term problem facing the project. Slashdot had previously reported when Wikipedia reached the 200,000 mark."
Considering that a load of Wikipedia articles are ripped from the encyclopedia Brittanica, and the fact that sooners or later Wikipedia will begin to encroach on Brittanicas businees, how long before Wikipedia gets sued for copyright theft. Either that of get battered by hoards of Brittanica salesmen hauling around fifty volumes and cheap plywood bookshelves.
You'd never know, maybe Encyclopedia Brittannica hold a copyright on 'A method of assembling articles containing information about concepts, entites and persons in an indexed linked form, using a computer'.
Remember no matter how obvious it is, if it uses a computer, you've got yourself a patent pal!
May the Maths Be with you!
But you do trust a convicted child molester like Robert Malda.
You are truly an American.
w00t? No link?
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Hey isn't CmdrTaco also known by the name Robert Malda?
--The Joke-Crushing Troll.
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 I came across it) East Germany 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.
The admin cabal on Wikipedia are ideological fanatics and spend their time going down their ideological lists. They don't tolerate facts that do not conform to their perception of things. I should also note that the history of the world's countries almost all come from state department or CIA documents originally, which were then modified in Wikipedia. That gives you an idea of what this history is grounded in. Just something to keep in mind - Wikipedia has it's own slanted view of history and the world, there are other wiki's with different points of view, and more close to reality in my opinion.
I never understood why the government didn't fund more projects like this.
Because the last thing that any government wants is a well educated population to question their actions. Large groups of simple people can be controlled very easily. Various religions have been doing it for centuries.
The more a population can think for themselves, the harder they are to control.
I don't know if anyone has read wiki pedias article on Africa. But the article is very inaccurate and has no basis in fact; when compared to other continents articles it is laughable.
I once respect wikipedia, although if they neglect to provide an accurate discription of a continent in correct historical context,they are not worth my time.
You obviously have no idea just how much government money goes into research and academic projects of all sorts. The government is probably the most impartial funding agency out there - moreso with NSF as opposed to DoD, of course.
"Occasionally, executions would be prolonged either by having the elephant drag the condemned through the streets before the execution (usually by a rope attached to the elephant's leg), or through the use of an elephant that was trained to crush limbs first, and then the chest, often with excruciating slowness."
"Although it was common in South Asia for rulers to use elephants as executioners, one Mogul Emperor in particular, Akbar (1547-1605), used his favorite elephant as a judge as well as an executioner. While ruling in the city of Agra from 1570-1585, Akbar came to believe that his favorite royal elephant could discern by instinct who was guilty of an offense and who was innocent. As a result, thousands of people during those 15 years, who were suspected of even minor offenses, were staked out before the great royal elephant and had to watch in horror as it was coaxed to step on them. The great majority of suspects were crushed to death, but on occasion the huge elephant would refuse. If that happened, the suspect was immediately released because, as Akbar noted, there was now clear proof of innocence."
Yet more proof that Islamic ways are insane by our standards and why Westerners can't coexist with them. They refuse to accept our views and we refuse to accept theirs. WWIII is coming, and either we destroy them or they destroy us; I don't see a way out.