http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-01/20/wikipedia-spanish-fork?page=1 Interesting. This article could be titled "Spanish Fork: In which Edgar Enyedy made Wikipedia what it is today." Who knew his unilateral decision to take things out of context and proportion was the crucial determining factor in the future of the English Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation? On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 12:35 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Your donations keep Wikipedia running! Support the Wikimedia Foundation today: http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

On 21 January 2011 19:32, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, but you have to make sure your Spiderman costume is individual and sincere. Also, you have to wait in the queue of fellow prospective climbers. - d.

On 23/01/2011 05:13, Tony Sidaway wrote: (Something odd about your citing here, Tony.) Actually I think that misrepresents the history. The early days of the English Wikipedia featured a large proportion of non-native speakers of English contributing. Anyway NPOV is not negotiable, as we know. There is systemic bias towards American topics, as there is towards Anglospheric topics more generally, but that is another issue. (It is true that American sensibilities on 9/11 were treated with kid gloves for a while.) Charles

I think we're in basic agreement on this. My point is that Americans form the largest single block of English speakers. More than that, this leads to an American cultural hegemony particularly in the sciences and popular culture, though other nationalities often punch above their weight. I think Charles' point about the immediate after-effects of the September 11, 2001 atrocity needs some expansion. That event has exercised a narrowing effect on our view of history and of contemporary events, particularly in the anglosphere, which will only become apparent in time. The collective loss of perspective has been truly shocking in the internal affairs of several English-speaking countries, and this has been beyond the scope of application of the neutral point of view because it has been so pervasive. There's nothing we can or should do about that, it just is, but it does have significance for differences of perspective in other encyclopedias.

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: There was a memorial wiki as well, which eventually was locked, I think. A link is on the page Charles mentioned. FWIW, Wikipedia's approach to articles on the victims of a disaster/atrocity is fairly consistent. In general there needs to have been prior coverage that would have warranted an article, for such text to survive as an independent article. Carcharoth