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Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a non-commercial, free/open pseudoleftist online encyclopedia of general knowledge written mostly by volunteers, running on free software, allowing almost anyone to edit its content (i.e. being a wiki); it is the largest and perhaps most famous encyclopedia created to date. It is licensed under CC-BY-SA and is run by the nonprofit organization Wikimedia Foundation. It is accessible at https://wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is a mainstream information source and therefore politically censored^1234567891011121314151617181920.

Shortly after the project started in 2001, wikipedia used to be a great project -- it was very similar to how LRS wiki looks right now; it was relatively unbiased, objective, well readable and used plain HTML and ASCII art (see it as https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePage), however over the years it got corrupt and by 2020s it has become a political battleground and kind of a politically correct joke. A tragic and dangerous joke at that. It's still useful in many ways but it just hardcore censors facts and even edits direct quotes to push a pseudoleftist propaganda. Do not trust Wikipedia, especially on anything even remotely touching politics, always check facts elsewhere, e.g. in old paper books, on Metapedia, Infogalactic etc. As old Wikipedia is still accessible, you may also browse the older, less censored version, to see how it deranged from a project seeking truth to one abusing its popularity for propaganda.

Wikipedia exists in many (more than 200) versions differing mostly by the language used but also in other aspects; this includes e.g. Simple English Wikipedia or Wikipedia in Esperanto. In all versions combined there are over 50 million articles and over 100 million users. English Wikipedia is the largest with over 6 million articles.

There are also many sister projects of Wikipedia such as Wikimedia Commons that gathers free as in freedom media for use on Wikipedia, WikiData, Wikinews or Wikisources.

Information about hardware and software used by Wikimedia Foundation can be found at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers. As of 2022 Wikipedia runs of the traditional LAMP framework and its website doesn't require JavaScript (amazing!). Debian GNU/Linux is used on web servers (switched from Ubunatu in 2019). The foundation uses its own wiki engine called MediaWiki that's written mainly in PHP. Database used is MariaDB. The servers run on server clusters in 6 different data centers around the world which are rented: 3 in the US, 3 in Europe and 1 in Asia.

Wikipedia was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and was launched on 15 January 2001. The basic idea actually came from Ben Kovitz, a user of wikiwikiweb, who proposed it to Sanger. Wikipedia was made as a complementary project alongside Nupedia, an earlier encyclopedia by Wales and Sanger to which only verified experts could contribute. Wikipedia of course has shown to be a much more successful project.

There exist forks and alternatives to Wikipedia. Simple English Wikipedia can offer a simpler alternative to sometimes overly complicated articles on the main English Wikipedia. Citizendium is a similar online encyclopedia co-founded by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia itself, which is however proprietary (NC license). Citizendium's goal is to improve on some weak points of Wikipedia such as its reliability or quality of writing. Metapedia and Infogalactic are a Wikipedia forks that are written from a more rightist/neutral point of view. Infogalactic is also a Wikipedia fork that tries to remove the pseudoleftist bullshit etc. Encyclopedia Britannica can also be used as a nice resource: its older versions are already public domain and can be found e.g. at Project Gutenberg, and there is also a modern online version of Britannica which is proprietary (and littered with ads) but has pretty good articles even on modern topics (of course facts you find there are in the public domain). Practically for any specialized topic it is nowadays possible to find its own wiki on the Internet.

Good And Bad Things About Wikipedia

Let's note a few positive and negative points about Wikipedia, as of 2022. Some good things are:

  • Despite its flaws Wikipedia is still a highly free, relatively high quality noncommercial source of knowledge for everyone, without ads and bullshit. It is quite helpful, Wikipedia may e.g. be printed out or saved in an offline version and used in the third world as a completely free educational resource (see Kiwix).
  • Wikipedia helped prove the point of free culture and showed that collaboration of volunteers can far surpass the best efforts of corporations.
  • Wikipedia's website is (/used to be) pretty nice (at least as of 2022), kind of minimalist, lightweight and works without Javascript. { Indeed as of 2023 they fucked it up :D It is still not as bad as other sites but it's shit now. ~drummyfish }
  • Wikipedia is very friendly to computer analysis, it provides all its data publicly, in simple and open formats, and doesn't implement any DRM. This allows to make a lot of research, in depth searching, collection of statistics etc.
  • Wikipedia drives the sister projects, some of which are extremely useful, e.g. Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata or MediaWiki.
  • Even if politically biased, Wikipedia may serve as a basis for forks that fix the political bias (Metapedia, InfoGalactic, ...).
  • Wikipedia presents itself as free encyclopedia (as of 2023), i.e. it uses the word "free" instead of "open", which is a good thing (see free software vs open source).
  • Though it became corrupt and censored lately, the project managed to create a relatively good encyclopedia in the past, which is still completely accessible and free, e.g. at https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org or internet archive.

And the bad things are (see also this site: http://digdeeper.club/articles/wikipedia.xhtml):

  • Wikipedia is censored, politically correct, biased, pushes a harmful political propaganda and often just pure lies, even though it proclaims the opposite (which makes it much worse by misleading people). "Offensive" material and material not aligned with pseudoleftist propaganda is removed as well as material connected to some controversial resources (e.g the link to 8chan, https://8kun.top, is censored, as well as Nina Paley's Jenndra Identitty comics and much more). There is a heavy pseudoleft, pseudoskeptic and soyence bias in the articles. It creates a list of banned sources (archive) which just removes all non-pseudoleftist sources -- so much for their "neutral point of view". It wasn't always this way, browsing pre 2010 Wikipedia provides a less censored experience.
  • Wikipedia includes material under fair use, such as screenshots from proprietary games, which makes it partially proprietary, i.e. Wikipedia is technically NOT 100% free. Material under fair use is still proprietary and can put remixers to legal trouble (e.g. if they put material from Wikipedia to a commercial context), even if the use on Wikipedia itself is legal (remember, proprietary software is legal too).
  • Wikipedia is intentionally deceptive -- it supports its claims by "citations" ("race is a social construct"^1234567891011121314151617181920) to make things look as objective facts, but the citations are firstly cherry picked (there is a list of banned sources), self-made (articles of Wikipedians themselves) and secondly the sources often don't even support the claim, they're literally there just for "good look". Not only do they practice censorship, they claim they do NOT practice censorship and then write article on censorship so as to define censorship in their own convenient way :) Furthermore their articles intentionally omit points of view of their political opponents.
  • Wikipedia often suffers from writing inconsistency, bad structure of text and poor writing in general. In a long article you sometimes find repeating paragraphs, sometimes a lot of stress is put on one thing while mentioning more important things only briefly, the level of explanation expertness fluctuates etc. This is because in many articles most people make small contributions without reading the whole article and without having any visions of the whole. And of course there are many contributors without any writing skills.
  • Wikipedia is too popular which has the negative side effect of becoming a political battlefield. This is one of the reasons why there has to be a lot of bureaucracy, including things such as locking of articles and the inability to edit everything. Even if an article can technically be edited by anyone, there are many times people watching and reverting changes on specific articles. So Wikipedia can't fully proclaim it can be "edited by anyone".
  • Wikipedia is hard to read. The articles go to great depth and mostly even simple topics are explained with a great deal of highly technical terms so that they can't be well understood by people outside the specific field, even if the topic could be explained simply (Simple English Wikipedia tries to fix this a little bit at least). Editors try to include as much information as possible which too often makes the main point of a topic drown in the blablabla. Wikipedia's style is also very formal and "not fun" to read, which isn't bad in itself but it just is boring to read. Some alternative encyclopedias such as Citizendium try to offer a more friendly reading style. Back in the day Wikipedia used to be written pretty well, check it out e.g. at https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org.
  • Wikipedia is not public domain. It is licensed under CC-BY-SA which is a free license, but has a few burdening conditions. We belive knowledge shouldn't be owned or burdened by any conditions.
  • Even though there are no ads, there regularly appears political propaganda, main page just hard pushes feminist shit as featured images and articles, there appear popups for LGBT/feminist activism, and of course all articles are littered with pseudoleftist propaganda etc.
  • Many articles are bought, there exist companies that offer editing and maintaining certain articles in a way the client desires and of course corporations and politicians take this opportunity -- of course Wikipedia somewhat tries to prevent it but no prevention ever works 100%, so a lot of information on Wikipedia is either highly misleading, untrue, censored or downright fabricated.

Fun And Interesting Pages

There are many interesting and entertaining pages and articles on Wikipedia, some of them are:

Alternatives

Due to mass censorship and brainwashing going on at Wikipedia it is important to look for alternatives that are important especially when researching anything connected to politics, but also when you just want a simpler, more condensed explanation of some topic. This is a comparison of Wikipedia and some of its alternatives, as of 2023:

{ See also old Wikipedia at https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race. ~drummyfish }

encyclopedia license comment
Wikipedia CC BY-SA biggest, mainstream, EXTREME CENSORSHIP AND PROPAGANDA
old Wikip. GFDL archived old Wikipedia, less censorship
Citizendium PROPRIETARY? (CC BY-NC-SA) similar to Wikipedia, probably censored as well, faggots have unclear license
Metapedia GFDL Wikip. fork, no SJW censorship, ATM limited account creation, "pro-European" fascism
Infogalactic CC BY-SA Wikip. fork, no SJW censorship, FOR PROFIT (you can buy article control lol), can't make accounts
installgentoo wiki "public domain" mostly tech, seems very uncesored
Britannica online PROPRIETARY proprietary, bloated, has ads, but nicely written
Britannica 1910 public domain very old but large and completely free, without any modern propaganda
WikiSpooks CC BY-SA no SJW censorship, seems only focused on politics
LRS wiki CC0 best encyclopedia
Conservaedia PROPRIETARY American fascist wiki, has basic factual errors
Vikidia CC BY-SA "Wikipedia for kids", probably as censored as Wikipedia
Encyclopedia Dramatica CC0 informal/fun/"offensive" but valuable info (on society, tech, ...), basically no censorship, no propaganda
Tor Hidden Wiki PROPRIETARY Deepweb wiki on Tor, probably less censored.

TODO: darknet wikis

See Also