Wiki Projects

So, I just checked out a few of the many projects of Wikimedia.  I did not realize that Wikimedia was an umbrella organization for all the other Wiki_________.  I always thought that Wikipedia stood on its on and then other companies liked the idea and started Wikiversity, etc.  Below are some thoughts on two projects I visited:

Wikiquote: Organization of quotes (by topic) is a strength of this site.  However, once I started digging a bit, I found that there were not as many quotes as I had expected.  Well, I'm a bit of a dork and clicked on Politics and then Democracy - so that could explain why there weren't very many. :) Joking aside, I have seen more quotes about democracy on other sites.

Wikinews: This website is a great example of a "best practice" of hypermedia. I just started scrolling around the site, clicked on a news article "Four Americans killed by Pirates" and in a short amount of time had found my way to the website of these two Americans from CA who sailed on a yacht around the world 1/2 a year. I read about their travels and looked at their plans for 2011.  It was a pretty cool website - they had uploaded pictures from Google Earth of each port of call they were going to be in.  The last one was planned for Oct 2011 in England.  :(  It is very sad that this sort of thing still goes on today.  These small instances of violence against Americans prove our weakness - we can't be everywhere at one time. Although we have ships stationed off the coast of Somalia, we can't guard every mile of ocean.  To me, those pirates in their small way, are throwing up the finger at America.  They aren't scared of us - or they wouldn't come anywhere near a US vessel.  So, before I keep going off on that tangent...wikinews was pretty neat.  I would question some of the material on there...for instance, the top story was that a candle was knocked over during some weird voodoo sex ritual that caught an apartment building on fire...newsworthy? Not so much...