FEBRUARY 2007
 Hello!
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
These words are not mine but were said by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia – “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”
Wikipedia was founded in January 2001, with the radical idea that every single person can have access to a free site and find out just about anything. It has since rapidly grown into the largest reference web site on the Internet.
The name comes from wiki, Hawaiian for ‘fast’ and pedia from ‘encyclopedia’.The current definition of a wiki is a website which allows users to add and edit content collectively – very much a community activity.
Anyone can add an article or make changes, the site doesn’t carry advertising and runs on voluntary donations. Wikipedia employs only five full-time staff, but has a diehard core of 400 online volunteers who help to stop the articles from becoming weapons of racism, hatred or ongoing vendettas.
How refreshing to find something so useful, that is available to anyone. No-one is making a fat profit from it, and it can be read in over 80 languages. It has 1.5 million articles written by users all over the world.
Crossword solvers find Wikipedia very useful for tracking down those elusive facts. When asked about errors, founder Wales said there were bound to be some, and if you find one, write in and correct it.
There are many other online encyclopedias of course, such as Encyclopedia Britannica, MSN Encarta and HighBeam, to mention a few. There are also free dictionaries online, but I shouldn’t be telling you this – now you’ll be able to find out all those tricky Stinker answers!
Happy puzzling!
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