davidrickard.net

Most internet users these days will come across the Wikipedia at some point. Most people do it pretty much unwittingly, without realising what the site is, as it could turn up in Google’s results. A great deal of people are like me, and may have a passing interest in something, so go look it up in the Wikipedia. For the uninitiated, the Wikipedia is a collaborative resource – a web-based encyclopedia with the twist that anybody viewing the page can edit it. This has led to defacements, and malicious changes, but due to the fact that the number of serious users far outweigh the destructive, these things are usually fixed pretty quickly. Recent comparisons between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica have shown it to be a concise, and worthwhile tool. Like all web-based resources, it’s wise to not use it as your one and only source of information, after all, there is an entire internet worth.

Having said all that, the Wikipedia is a fantastic resource. I’ve made all sorts of edits myself, mostly fixing little typos people have made and not noticed. It needs more support than just people editing content. That content has to live on servers, which need to be in data centres connected to the world. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen for free, and so the Wikimedia Foundation are asking people to donate. You can do this via many methods, so get yourself over to this page and donate now!

It would seem that the nice folks at WordPress quietly released version 2.0 yesterday. I installed it this morning, and there’s some very nice new features, such as WYSIWYG editing built in. It’s about time – whilst I have no major issues with writing code, I’d rather just get on with my rambling than checking I have the syntax right.