Google's PageRank has proven ineffective against abuse by wikis. PageRank is useful for regular Web sites, but when it comes to the new wave of Web sites run by wikis, PageRank is rendered useless. PageRank is a thing of the past. The Google people didn't anticipate the wiki flood. So it seems easy to abuse PageRank by setting up a Web site run by a wiki, a Web site whose pages are typically highly interconnected and serve as a maze where PageRank gets trapped and confused.

What's bad about this is that the wikis with the most pages are monopolized by Wikimedia. Of the 80 wikis with the most pages, around three quarters are hosted by Wikimedia. This is bad, because it shows that the wiki world has little diversification of hosts. This means high risk for Web users. It means depending on an organization like Wikimedia for most wiki content.

This is why more people should be taught how to host wikis. Sure, not everyone is interested in contributing to the Web's content, but wikis make it easier for people who are already interested. That's what's so special about wikis. They automate the creation of Web pages. After all, that's what computers are for. They're there to perform repetitive tasks and increase productivity.

Okay, so just to get this straight:

You want to have "Wikipedia Review" as a wiki (I don't see any reason to change the name, just call it Wikipedia Review wiki, and this can be Wikipedia Review forum, and we can also have Wikipedia Review group blog, Wikipedia Review IRC channel, and caps, t-shirts, whatever else we want). And then on the wiki we can post criticisms? Just for posting criticisms about Wikipedia, both macro and micro?

But the thing is that you set up Wikimediasucks wiki. What happened to that?

The only thing is that a wiki would almost certainly be completely vandalised within a few days since we have a smaller amount of users than Wikipedia itself

you can make it so only approved user can register and edit, like some Wikimedia wiki.

Very good point Selina, and I agree.

If we did it as a wiki, it should be openly available to edit. But then that'd take up too much space. And I can bet that within moments it'd be full of "Zordrac is a stupid troll" and "Selina is schitzo" and "Lir is a liar" and whatever else (apologies if that offends Selina or Lir there, just using examples). But if we make it by registration, then it'd be a lot of work.

Why not have a group blog? I like the group blog idea better. We can have it like a news feed. Either just post some of the better bits from here on to the group blog, or else even do it a bit like how wikiwatch works, with a few articles and comments.

And people who have access to the group blog don't have to be the same people who are admins here. Blu would do it I am sure, but we can allow different people to do it.

Anyway, if there's some way to make the wiki idea work, then I don't object. But I am cautious of it though.

Actually, just a point here, but Wikipedia in a lot of ways acts as a group blog effort at an encyclopaedia, hence the name "Encycloblog" and hence perhaps having our own "Encycloblog" might be a good way to criticise it.

Qwert, I agree with your sentiment, but would like to add to it a bit. The only way to counter Wikimedia is with either a single large wiki (which isn't a wiki at all), or many, many smaller wikis. In addition, in order to be as effective when dealing with Google's broken PageRank, the wiki needs to be licensed under a free-use license such as GFDL, so that it encourages pornographic clones that are designed strictly to generate ad revenue. And it has to become well-known enough that people actually create these pornographic clones.

Jimbo Wales has stated that conservative icon Friedrich "Hayek’s work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". He has stated what his political views are many times, and has personally harassed and chased off left-leaning people, even admins like Secretlondon. Then there are his appointees to ArbCom like the conservative Fred Bauder, the Zionist POV pusher Jayjg who was appointed over people with more votes than him and so forth.

While I don't disagree with people who think it's *tactically* important to spend some time editing on Wikipedia at the moment, I think it is *strategically* imperative to build up alternative wikis to Wikipedia. Since I see the problem with Wikipedia as the cabal and their POV, not to mention the demographic POV mentioned in the systemic bias project, particularly their hostility to the workers movement, I naturally want a wiki encyclopedia that is more friendly to the workers movement. Some choices are :

• Demopedia - Democratic Underground's liberal/socdem wiki
• Dkosopedia - DailyKos's liberal/socdem wiki
• Red Wiki - a socialist/communist wiki
• Anarchopedia - an anarchist wiki
• Sourcewatch - a specialist progressive wiki, tracks lobbyists etc.

I contribute to these wikis, and know that they will gain momentum and at some point reach a critical mass to where they're competitive with Wikipedia, especially since Wikipedia's cabal is so biased. It will probably be a few years before we have a decent progressive wiki encyclopedia competitor to Wikipedia that people know about.

Yeah, it's not like "wiki" means anything really as far as I know - it's just an invented word for what you describe above.

Sooo, what else could be a good word for "collaborative editing software"? I mean, obviously the reason the word "wiki" was invented by Larry Sanger/Jimbo Wales was because "collaborative editing software" is a mouthful

It's interesting how the propaganda that everyone is equal in Wikipedia succeeds so well too - so many sites wrongly claim that Wikipedia is democratic, when anyone who's edited there knows it's no such thing - a group of 700 or so administrators hold power over the "lower class", and up above the administrators you have ArbCom, then the Wikimedia Foundation, then Jimbo - who can quite literally get away with ANYTHING he wants to, with one of his favourite quotes being a very fascist-sounding one that "voting [democracy] is evil"

Is it even legal to copyright nouns or adjectives like "Hasty" ("wiki")?

Would someone copyrighting Hawaiian/Easter Island for "Potato" be legal?