[url="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEo-IkDwVNUVxSF0mcnHlWZLjjmmw&url=http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2010/12/ecured_cubas_castro-aproved_wi.php"][img]http://nt3.ggpht.com/news/tbn/t_QlAzxaMNSe-M/6.jpg[/img]
Miami New Times (blog)[/url]
<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />EcuRed, Cuba's Castro-Aproved [b]Wikipedia Clone, Launches, Has Curious Take on Miami[/b]
Miami New Times (blog)
​The resurgent Fidel Castro -- riding a new high as the world's foremost peddler of Bilderberg conspiracies ...

and more »

View the article

See, that's why I like wikipedia. Because the alternatives are worse. Imagine an Internet where all sources of information are from Geocities. Or the only online encyclopedia being a set of Knol articles. Or wikipedia disappearing, and its articles hosted at Citizendium and written at its usual level of quality. Or Wikipedia Review getting a monopoly on articles about corporations. *shudders*

Is the alternative worse: Wikipedia Review is unashamedly a business listing service; EcuRed is unashamedly a single perspective work. You know where you stand.

Wikipedia, a hotch-potch collection of points of view where it is not possible at a glance to understand what perspective is being taken, but there is a fair amount of American-centric and pop culture perspective

Having just been taking a look at Piccadilly Circus take a look at the horrible tagged section "Piccadilly Circus in Popular Culture" or the discussion on major shops which basically discusses a closed record shop (which also shows another lack of perspective as PC was never The Record Shop in London, that was always HMV in Oxford Street). If you discussed impressions of the Circus, would anyone really bother about the shops? Wikipedia does have a perspective, it is the perspective of the banal, where trivia is exalted, culture is a necessary evil to coatrack upon.

Tell me more of how I obtain this monopoly you speak of. It sounds like my path to riches! I'm sure Dun & Bradstreet and Hoover's should be easy enough to knock off.

By the way... don't forget your precious Wikipedia articles that were written BY ME in exchange for PAYMENT. How do you discern those articles from the others around them? How do you know that most of the major articles on Wikipedia weren't written in exchange for payment or aren't currently under the influence of major corporations? You just imagine or hope that they aren't.

Meanwhile, look at EcuRed's Alexa stats. That doesn't look like a website that just recently came online and became an overnight media sensation.

Are we the only idiots who care about this kind of government encyclopedia?

You prefer that articles are handled by organizations that have a clear POV? But, for example, Wikipedia Review would have no negative information about any company. If you wanted to learn about a company, and the only option available were to be Wikipedia Review, you would only have a pastel-colored view of positive fluff. At least, in wikipedia, you can expect to get a glimpse of all negative and positive views, vaguely represented in the same proportion as its real-world importance, with clear citations to many many external sources that you can follow to get more in-depth info. I don't know of any website that did this before wikipedia, and I think that it still remains this way (although the situation has improved a lot).

(It's better if you are bilingual, or multilingual, or ready to use translation tools. You can read the same article in other languages, and get different perspectives. I can read English, Spanish, Catalan and a bit of French, and I am surprised at how the same topic can be twisted beyond recognition depending on which wikipedia is writing it, and how local perspective can affect the writing)

Just make an ad-free website, and hope that unpaid idealistic volunteers will make the work for you!

I can hope that they will eventually get fixed, because there is no deadline.

Just to be clear, in English Wikipedia you are still getting a clear POV - that of an immature sexual fantasist male libertarian IT geek. It sets up a world view that pervades articles in most unexpected ways and is seeping out into the real world.

In fact, I think that we are seeing the Wikipedian attitude seeping its way into British politics - the cult of the amateur where we are being told it is better for local volunteers to run local services and magically things will be ok, rather forgetting why the local authorities were introduced in the first place. Sure, the bureaucratic infrastructure of the UK is bloated and in need of reform, but turning it off and walking away is the worst sort of libertarian uncritical thinking that the likes of Wikipedia has immersed us in. I don't blame Wikipedia for inventing it, but I blame it for perpetuating a myth that it works and is risk free.

Another myth you seem to have fallen for is that before Wikipedia, information was unsourced. Any serious book (or specialist web site) on a subject, in fact even many lightweight books, have always quoted sources which you are welcome to look up. In fact, it was because Wikipedia was producing such broken information that they introduced the sourcing requirement taken from traditional authoring - your post sounds like you think Wikipedia brought referencing information to the world. The world of information existed before the web, and in those days serious authors justified there works with proper research rather than a SlimVirginesque after-the-fact-Google to support a position. Wikipedia was based on the web which expressly was brought into being to support hyper-linking - the referencing of information - don't delude yourself that Wikipedia invented the key concept that brought Teh Interweb to the public.

Take for example the Alfred Gilbert statue there, nowhere in wikipedia will you find that he ended up paying for the casting and the bronze (£3000) because the Government reneged on an agreement to pay him. The article on Alfred Gilbert briefly mentions that he was made bankrupt but not why. So what does it talk about? Well the important things like his wife's mental state and the sexual relationship he had with his Belgian housekeeper.

Wrong, once again, Enric.

This is the must succinct statement I have yet seen of the crowdsourcing ideology that underlies the whole Frei Kultur Kinder Kult. I still prefer this more familiar meme, though:

STEP 1: Build a wiki.
STEP 2: Make it "radically open".
STEP 3: ?
STEP 4: FREE CULTURE!

"Time to go to work! Work all night! Get stuff to plagiarize, heeeeey! . . ."

I like how he assumes my paid articles need fixing. They're better than most!

Lies! One day I'll write a good article about a company, just so I can rub it in your face.





no negative information about any company... except those companies that you happen to despise.

Before 2004-2005, if you searched information in the internet, were you bound to find exhaustive sourced information about almost any topic you searched?

Maybe I should explain one personal experience. I live in Aragon, near Catalonia, and I have often discussed with Catalan nationalists (catalanists). Before wikipedia, there were lots of catalanists websites saying all sort of stuff about how Catalonia was so big and powerful, and how Aragon had almost no role at all during the Middle Ages. When wikipedia appeared, they took it by assault. But, progressively, as non-nationalistic people got involved, as higher-quality sources were required, the catalanist propaganda has been replaced with accurate balanced information that explain the proper places of Aragon and Catalonia. It's still an ongoing thing, but it has resulted in very detailed articles that I couldn't possibly dream of finding online in 2004-2005.

Books, you say? I was talking about online resources. You know, that old dream about putting all the knowledge of mankind in computers, so it's instantly accesible by all humans at any moment from any place. That old dream about placing a computer in an orbital satellite so it can be accessed from anywhere in the surface ("but how will we get rid of the paper chads from the punched cards? And the paper dust caused by the perforating could be a health concern!") . Later expanded by Arthur C. Clarke who wrote a story about three geostationary satellites, each one with a computer, so the information can be retrieved from anywhere in Earth's surface.