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Saturday, January 15, 2011

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, celebrates its 10th birthday

Jimmy Wales is the co-founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, along with Larry Sanger and others.
The rise of Wikipedia

Wikipedia succeeded an earlier attempt at an encyclopaedia called Nupedia. Nupedia grew slowly because of its lenghty submission format, which required articles to be peer reviewed.

Sanger was then introduced to the concept of a wiki, and thus creating  Wikipedia . Wales continues is on the Board of Trustees of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, and he also co-founded Wikia, a for-profit wiki hosting site. Sanger resigned in 2002.

Rightardia is grateful for Wikipedia because we use it as a research tool for our articles. We could subscribe to a commercial encyclopaedia, but still run into copuright issues. Wikipedia is breathe of fresh air in America, an overly commercialized country.

Wikipedia writes objective, non-political articles. As Rightardia has pointed out in other articles, history has not been kind to te Republican party which has been on the wrong side of all too many issues.

Rightardia has often used Wikipdedia articles to refute right wing propaganda that the US is a Christian nation, the Civil War was a struggle for State's Rights, The Depression was caused by the Democratic Party, and the Shah of Iran was a benevolent leader.

The right became incensed by the efforts of progressive writers to use facts to refute their contentions. A wingnut actually created an alternative to Wikipedia called Conservapedia.

Facts are facts

Of course, Wikipedia is not a progressive or liberal encyclopedia. There is no need for  a Progessapedia or Liberalpedia. Democrats don't need to spin or distort data to make their points.

If you wants an example of how Conservatpedia tries to distort reality, read the article on dinosaurs: see http://www.conservapedia.com/Dinosaur. It's a laugher.

The St. Petersburg Times wrote an article about Wikipedia that acknowledged that Wikipedia was founded in St. Petersburg. Jimmy Wales still lives in Tampa Bay and the Wikipedia server farm  is located in the Tampa Bay area as well.

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