Wikipedia

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Wikipedia describes itself as "a free-content encyclopedia, written collaboratively by people from around the world." There are active editions in more than 150 languages. As of May 3, 2007, the English-language site (the largest) contained more than 1.7 million articles of varying depth on a huge variety of subjects. Wikipedia is owned and run by the Wikimedia Foundation of St. Petersburg, Florida, whose goals are "to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge."

Its English-language version is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Commentary

The most important reason for there to be a dKosopedia in addition to a large and more heavily trafficked Wikipedia is that Wikipedia is philosophically devoted to a "neutral point of view" (NPOV), which has the effect of suppressing progressive viewpoints, or alternately creating a false parity between a credible viewpoint and an incredible one simply to be "neutral" (See also: Meta Main).

Also, while Wikipedia is just what its name implies, an encyclopedia site, dKosopedia tries to make a broader use of the potential of the wiki media form by using the site as a place to coordinate activism and develop progressive ideas, rather the focusing strictly on collecting information.

Importing material between Wikipedia and dKosopedia

Both Wikipedia and dKosopedia license their content under the GNU Free Documentation License. Accordingly, material can be imported from one project to the other if the requirements of the GFDL are met. One such requirement is that principal authors must be credited. The easiest way to do that is to link back to the source, so that a reader can see the authors by checking the page history. Therefore:

  • Material copied from Wikipedia to seed or augment a dKosopedia article should generally include an attribution line of this type:
This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "McCarthyism". The list of authors can be found here.
  • Material copied from dKosopedia to Wikipedia should include a similar attribution line. It should also conform to the NPOV policy or it will probably be reverted in short order.
  • If you're copying only material that you yourself wrote, you don't need to include such a link. You might find it useful to note that you're the author, however, in your edit summary and/or on the article's talk page. Otherwise a later editor might think that the terms of the GFDL had been violated.
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