Tuesday 4 September 2007

Wikis

A wiki is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it; you can read about them here. They may be categorised under Culture and the Arts, Directories, Geographic, Political, Religion, Recreational, Reference, Science and Technology, Societal and Travel. Some are run by the Wikimedia Foundation and are sister projects to the mighty Wikipedia, one of the ten most visited websites in the world. Here are a few which I have found useful or amusing:

Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet with over 7 million articles in over 200 languages, and still growing.

Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia, is a satirical parody of Wikipedia, sample here

Wikiquote is a vast database of quotations from prominent people, books, films and proverbs.

Wiktionary is a multilingual free content dictionary, available in over 150 languages

Citizendium aims to function in a similar way to Wikipedia, but does not allow anonymous editing and introduces a new "editor" role for specialists in particular subjects.

Wikimedia is a database of nearly two million freely usable media files.

Conservapedia, “The Trusworthy (sic) Encyclopedia” exists to promote the viewpoint of the American fundamentalist Christian right wing. Its 16,800 “educational, clean, and concise entries” are mostly fallacious, unhelpful, bigoted or very, very, funny. There is an assessment of it here and some examples here.

Rationalwiki. A brief glance at Conservapedia can bring on serious depression, and a useful pick-me-up is Rationalwiki, which aims to analyse and refute the anti-science movement and the full range of crackpot ideas, and to explore authoritarianism and fundamentalism. It also provides a running commentary on the Conservapedia website and a witty and devastating critique of its drivel.

This post may be informative, but it's a bit dull, so to liven it up here’s a lovely photo (from Wikimedia) of Leadenhall Market, London.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

How amusing! I (selfishly) went here: http://www.conservapedia.com/Translation
which gave me my "chuckle of the day".

Dejargonification indeed!

Anonymous said...

Hello Amanda
I suppose this Conservapedia entry , though banal and flimsy, was not quite as idiotic as most.
They could of course have chosen a much better translation story, such as the one about la sagesse Normande but their readers wouldn't have got the point.

Minerva said...

You dull? Pah! I spit in my dragoon of boredom at such a comment!

Anonymous said...

Why hello lovely Min, nice to hear from you. But Wikis was five posts ago: haven't you visited OMF since? I read everything you write.

I suppose one spits in a dragoon the same way as one marches by spittoons.

Books to mark and lessons to plan? You sound like my wife; teachers are so bloody devoted, aren't they?

Hope the PET is cheering.