Wikitruth

Wikitruth was a spinoff of Wikibooks created, funded, operated by David Gerard and Lir, and founded by Larry Sanger. Like this site it runs on the MediaWiki platform.

Most of the articles on Wikitruth were written by Tim Starling and Brion Vibber, about their hiking trips and all the salmon they have caught. This started to bother Sanger and Lir who held a private IRC discussion about this, and where they formed a secret consensus.
As a result, Sanger unilaterally speedied all of their "unencyclopedic" hiking reports, their navigation templates and categories, and went on a date-delinking spree. Jimbo Wales, outraged, refused to edit Wikipedia until Lir could form a reasonable explanation for Sanger's behavior. Larry Sanger, out of stress, retired from Wikitruth. His talk page is filled with messages like "come back," and "please don't go."

Wikitruth has been decla-TELL THE WIKITRUTH!-red a munition in Wikipedia and cannot be carried across article lines without declaration unless one is determined to game the system. On Saturdays, however, Wikitruthers take a break and refrain from from all this madness.

Editing

Unlike most other wikis, Wikitruth cannot be edited by anyone. How the articles actually get on there is anyone's guess. Some believe it is the collective consciousness of all the editors of Wikipedia, while others believe it is some kind of sentient offshoot of the Wikipedia servers themselves, caused by the stress of so many people editing and reverting articles all the time. No crazy conspiracy theories have emerged yet, though.

References

• Gonsalves, Antone. "Wikipedia Protest Site 'A Hoax' - Founder." Information Week (TechWeb). April 17, 2006. link

  Jimbo Wales passes off his self-criticism site as a "hoax" to the media.