Wikinfo

Wikinfo, formerly known as Internet-Encyclopedia (renamed in January 2004), is an online encyclopedia and a of the English initiated by Fred Bauder in July 2003. It is hosted by ibiblio.

Wikinfo policies
Rather than adopting 's neutral point of view editorial policy, Wikinfo's policy on a contributor's point of view is to edit for a sympathetic point of view. This policy endeavors to present a subject or concept in a favorable light. A main article is written from a sympathetic point of view, described as "a way of encouraging a pluralism of content, rather than limiting content to an unattainable encyclopedic goal". A critical article in the style of ": A critical view" is likewise encouraged. A set of articles about a particular topic are split into a number of articles with a specified point of view— thus Wikinfo can have several points of view on each topic, each linked to the other at the top of the article.

Users of Wikinfo feel this policy is a way of escaping debilitating edit wars (disagreements in which wiki editors undo one another's changes repeatedly), which they perceive to be frequent on . They aim to avoid becoming "hamstrung by squabbling sysops getting legalistic about their biases", as Wikinfo user Proteus describes . Some Wikinfo users appreciate the fact that their submissions are not edited as frequently as on . and states: "Creativity and diversity are strongly encouraged in our articles. This means we do not encourage the capricious generation of factoids, but the deeper connections and discussion of new patterns revealed to us by other knowledge."

Importation and modification of articles

Wikinfo uses the GNU Free Documentation License for most of its text, which allows verbatim copying and modification as long as derivative works remain licensed under the same terms. Wikinfo also supports signed articles, which are not subject to substantial editing by others and can be released under another license. In contrast with , Wikinfo does not allow unregistered editing; this is done to prevent vandalism and protect users' privacy, as unregistered users still have their IP addresses publicly revealed and recorded. As of August 2007, there is some activity on Wikinfo, with several hundred edits per week.

By December 2007 Wikinfo had approximately 37,700 articles. The process of importing articles was accelerated by GetWiki. This interface, a highly modified version of release 1.1.0 of the MediaWiki software (2003) used to power and other websites, was formerly used by Wikinfo. The intention of GetWiki's author, M.R.M. Parrott ("proteus"), was to add some new features to MediaWiki, but it was decided to fork the codebase from the MediaWiki project in January 2004. Instead of red links, GetWiki used green links to point to articles which did not exist locally.

When the user followed such a link, GetWiki would try to dynamically fetch it from the wiki designated as an external source (in Wikinfo's case, the English ), then would render and display the article text. A local copy was created only if the page was edited. Effectively, Wikinfo therefore provided a transparent "wrapper" around pages which had not yet been copied.

Wikinfo no longer uses GetWiki.

Multilingual
Although there are no subdomains on Wikinfo to separate articles of different languages, Wikinfo allows articles in languages other than English and requests that articles on the same topic in different languages link to each other. Existing links to articles in other languages are retained in the case of articles copied from .

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