Does anyone else here like the Wikipedia?

[Agathon]

I never thought that it would work, but it has been getting better and better. I reckon it will soon overtake all others as the premier non-specialist encyclopedia - which is not to say that the same model wouldn't work for these as well.

Love it or hate it

[Kropotkin]

Yeah, I do have to agree. It's very useful nowadays when you want to get your hands on information quickly.

[Agathon]

Some bits are better than others, but I just looked and it has links to online versions of all of Aristotle's works and not a bad summary of his ideas too.

So much for people who claim that co-operative enterprises can never compete with competitive ones.

[OzzyKP]

It is excellent. A fascinating concept and leap forward I think. There is even an entry on me, hehe.

Except there are dangers involved, like people can go and **** with it. The revert option is nice though. Someone f.cked with the entry on me, but with the tools Wikipedia has I was able to figure out who he was and I saw that he also totally erased the entry on Palestine. Then he changed his mind and replaced it with several pages of hostile quotes saying there is no such thing as Palestine or Palestinians.

[reds4ever]

I'd never heard of it before, I searched it for some relatively obscure things and it came up trumps every time. Any significant 'cons' about it? How is it funded?

[Solver]

Rather fantastic. One of my favorite places for random reading. Great to use when I need something, for entertainment or for general education.

It's not funded really, unfortunately, so it needs donations. Don't know about cons really... though I'm not sure about how would people react if you put Wikipedia as a referrence in your scientific work. OTOH, Wikipedia does often in turn have references to good sources.

[Sava]

I love it. It's great because they link so many things in their pages. It's easy for me to click and read something I'm not familiar with. And they are really up-to-date also.

[Ramo]

Yep, really useful.

[Whoha]

It has some nice information

[Urban Ranger]

Cons? No real cons.

People can mess with the content, and it can be patchy here and there.

Otherwise, excellent idea

So much for people who claim that co-operative enterprises can never compete with competitive ones.

The beauty of it is, everybody puts a little bit in, but gets a whole lot back.

It's pretty much the same idea behind the OSS (Open Source Software) movement. Look at www.sourceforge.net. It simply is staggering. Yes, a lot of the stuff isn't so hot, but a good number of projects are of commercial quality, and a few are just pure genius.

[St Leo]

Wikipedia is the ultimate triumph of socialist democracy.

[Q Classic]

sorry, that's not quite it, st. leo.

wikipedia is the ulitmate triumph of open-source, information-free democracy. not socialist.

[Imran Siddiqui]

It's actually pretty good. I wonder, what safeguards are there for protecting articles from political biases? I looked that GW Bush one, and it was very balanced. I'd imagine if it was a free for all in editing, it would not be anywhere close to that.

[St Leo]

Information wants to be libre and gratis.

Why isn't it socialist?^-^

[Q Classic]

it's no more socialist than the concept of open-source is socialist. information should be free not because of socialist ideals, but because information begets information, and only in a democratic environment--regardless of the economics--can open source truly thrive.