Just what does it want to accomplish?
Considering that the Wikipedia, like any wiki, logs its own history, my habit
of occasionally taking screenshots of various pages has been, perhaps, unnecessary.
It does, however, make for interesting reading.
The present, as of December 2006, main page of the Wikipedia tells us simply that
the Wikipedia is
the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit
We have to go quite a long way back to find an earlier, and to my mind more committal, statement of purpose. In September 2003, we read that
Wikipedia is a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate free content encyclopedia
One year earlier, in December 2002, we were told that the Wikipedia was
a collaborative project to produce a free and complete encyclopedia in every language
and still earlier, in August 2002 the claim was that the Wikipedia was
a collaborative project to produce a complete encyclopedia from scratch
For a very long time now, the Hebrew edition of the Wikipedia has told us (in Hebrew, of course) that the Wikipedia is
a multilingual project for the construction of a collaborative, free and accurate encyclopedia that anyone can edit
and though I'm sure that this was once the wording in English as well, my quite
incomplete search of the history pages of the main page didn't uncover that particular
wording.
So in the past it's striven for free, sometimes for complete, and
frankly, not always for accurate. Today it seems to be willing to settle
only for free. Then again, although this is a statement of purpose, and
as such an important aspect of the Wikipedia, I doubt that the Wikipedians themselves
read that main page very often. Some may never see it. It makes for an interesting
read, but not much more than that.
Go to: As far as resources go ..., or
Go to: Don't Bogart that Info