> From: Brad Mayer <Bradley.Mayer at Sun.COM>
>
>>It quotes "prominent Saudi dissident" Ali Al-Ahmed. Turns
>>out Al Ahmed is a buddy of our old friend Stephen Schwartz:
>>http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Ali_Al-Ahmed
>
>
> Ah, Brad, I see you quoted from Disinfopedia. Cool, I just started playing around with wikis like Disinfopedia a few months ago. A wiki is a web site with many web pages that anyone can edit. This collaborativeness allows lots of neat stuff. Disinfopedia is a wiki based on seeing who is tied to who, who funds what industry group and so forth, it's quite handy. I am the one who did the entry for the AFL-CIO's American Institute for (soi disant) Free Labor Development. Anyone can add to it, or do the entry for its bastard child, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity. Researching this entry made me hate the labor lieutenants of the AFL-CIO even more, the former AIFLD people after Sweeney booted them were all working along with Otto Reich in Latin American sweatshops before Bush brought him back in the fold.
The Disinfopedia is a pretty useful reference tool. I'm really glad that this one exists.
> There's also the left wingish Recyclopedia ( http://www.recyclopedia.info ), but currently that's so popular that it overloads for long periods.
>
> Then there's Wikipedia, but that is run by a right-wing "libertarian" cabal which you shouldn't even really bother with - I got them to change the definition of East Germany from "The DDR was a Communist satellite state of the former Soviet Union" to something slightly more neutral, but it's like pulling teeth, the deck is stacked against you, and it's not even worth the effort.
Wikipedia is a good idea with plenty of useful content. I've added some content, but I've been disappointed with its politics and lack of authority in the editorial process. For a time there was a bunch of right wing libertarian nonsense in the "anarchism" entry. I haven't checked this week to see if they've slipped back in.
I'm planning to start up several Wikis at Infoshop.org. One will be for our long-planned anti-capitalist database on corporations. The other one will be more fun: a comprehensive wiki on science fiction and fantasy (sfwiki.org, which isn't active yet).
Yes, I really am an anarchist librarian and don't play one on TV.
Chuck0 http://chuck.mahost.org