Wikipedia’s free software articles as of April 2008

Posted by ciaran on 0

After the free software movement, Wikipedia has to be my favourite computer-enabled community project. It does a first rate job of getting computer users involved, it’s articles can be freely copied and modified, and it has lots of useful info.

Since I blogged about it last year, English Wikipedia’s Free Software Portal has continued to improve. The "Topics" and "Featured and Good content" boxes on the portal are interesting, as is the separate archive of highlighted articles. There are now also Free Software Portals on 15 of the Wikipedia’s in other languages (compared to 6 in March 2007). For the list, see the box at the bottom of the left-hand column of the Portal.

As well as the articles having good info, the references sections at the bottom of each article are very useful. I often dig around the references when I’m looking for an old webpage or news article whose title I can’t remember.

Here is a list of some good free software articles. They’re good, but remember that you can improve them.

Of course, there are also plenty of articles that really should be better, such as:

And interesting related articles:

And there are hundreds of articles on specific free software packages: glibc, GCC, Emacs, OpenOffice.org, RockBox, etc.

The coordination WikiProject for Free Software is still there, but isn’t used for much.

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
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