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== FreeWiki - Introduction

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Modifying the sovereignty over information and interpretation in controversial subjects.

outline of a new project

Wikipedia is a wonderful endeavour to collect all human knowledge in one place and make it universally accessible in many languages. Never before has the knowledge of humanity been freely accessible for so many people all over the world. Nevertheless nothing is perfect, and neither is Wikipedia. When we leave the sphere of simple facts and look at controversial subjects – be it in politics, in medicine or in philosophy – we find many articles that are clearly biased. Here Wikipedia is not being used to inform the reader about unmistakable facts, but to transport opinions of certain groups in the disguise of information. This should obviously not be the purpose of a platform like Wikipedia, but it happens here and there. Experience of many people has shown that this cannot be changed at the moment, because those who run Wikipedia and who have the last word on the content of the articles are enforcing such bias for reasons we can only speculate about. As far as I could find out, such controversial subjects that are covered in a clearly biased way include different branches of alternative medicine, political views that are diverging from a mainstream understanding, even biographies of persons that are seen as exponents of the aforementioned issues. As Wikipedia is not just a website among many but as it carries the sovereignty over information and interpretation for many millions of people, this bias is a severe problem. And the more so, the less people tend to use other sources than the internet. Since Wikipedia is as it is, the only way to deal with this growing problem is to install an alternative that offers the possibility to publish dissenting and diverging views of such controversial subjects, without questioning the authority of the great web-encyclopaedia in those realms where it is brilliant.

This is the idea of <FreeWiki.eu>, a wiki based website that works very similar to Wikipedia and is open to all those who see their issue misrepresented in Wikipedia. FreeWiki will follow the same strict rules regarding sources, quotation, ethical values (non-discriminating, non-racist, no insults or offences, etc.), and others as Wikipedia. FreeWiki shall become multi-lingual in the long run. It will start with English and German articles, but is open to any translations. FreeWiki would be under creative commons licence and donation based. FreeWiki would be more strictly bound to monitoring and approval of changes by a group of editors to avoid being overrun by the same groups that now enforce the bias of Wikipedia.

You are invited to participate in this project and introduce your fields of knowledge in form of articles. Any kind of proposals, ideas, criticism and additions are very welcome. Interested? Write to Joerg Wichmann, jw@provings.info