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Wikinfo, formerly known as Internet-Encyclopedia (renamed in January 2004), is a fork of Wikipedia initiated by Fred Bauder in July 2003. It makes no
attempt to be multilingual, although existing links to Wikipedia articles in other languages are retained in the case of articles
copied from Wikipedia.
Wikinfo's policy on point of view is different from Wikipedia: rather
than adopting a neutral point of view, the set of
articles about a particular topic are split into a number of articles with a
specified point of view — thus it tries to have several points of view on each topic. The main article is written from a
sympathetic point of view which is described as [1] :
"sympathetic point of view is a way of encouraging a pluralism of content, rather than limiting content to an unattainable
encyclopedic goal."
Users of Wikinfo, called "Wikinfoans" or "Wikinfos", feel Wikinfo is a way of escaping debilitating edit wars, which they perceive to be frequent on Wikipedia. They do not want to become "Wikipedia -
hamstrung by squabbling sysops getting legalistic about their biases". Some Wikinfos think "Its wonderful that they can work
there without some other user deleting half of what they wrote and changing their text into something else", which they believe
to be a regular practice on Wikipedia.
Wikinfo policy on edits:- “We edit imported Wikipedia articles. We edit articles which we've written or largely written
ourselves. We edit articles written by Wikinfos if we have something useful to add or if an article is wrong/badly written. We
don't edit fellow Wikinfos just for fun unless there's a good reason for an edit.”
In May, 2004, Wikinfo had over 26,000 articles, most of which have been copied from Wikipedia with minimal modification.
Wikinfo uses GetWiki, a fork of the MediaWiki software. It is hosted by ibiblio.
One source of tension which has arisen with Wikipedia users is that Wikipedia user pages and user talk pages display on
Wikinfo if Wikinfo users ask for them. Although they are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License, it is felt by a few
Wikipedia users that a false impression is created that they participate in Wikinfo. While these pages have some limited uses for
Wikinfo users, only a few Wikipedia user pages which are of interest to Wikinfo users have been saved. It is possible to prevent
the automated display of these pages by editing them.
External links
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