Wilkepedia Where?

Can you believe it? Cuba, that last bastion of old line communism, that prison of an island that has tried to kill internet connections at every turn, is now in the Wilkipedia business. Yep! Their is a Cuban version of Wilkipedia that is up and running with nearly 20,000 entries posted at ecured.cu The site says the aim is "to spread knowledge without a profit motive". Uh, or perhaps the intent is to spread false propaganda and keep the natives from reading the truth about Cuba and it's thugs that are in charge.

I assume you know that the "other" Wilkipedia is the world's biggest free-content encyclopedia. For all it's faults of misinformation that is occasionally deviously posted, Wilipedia is a quick source of information about less than earth shattering subjects. But the Cuban version will have all entries approved by "administrators approval", so Cubans will need good luck trying to post anything there that challenges the dictatorship's viewpoint.

According to The Cuban Wilkipedia site, it was developed "to create and disseminate the knowledge of all and for all, from Cuba and with the world". "Its philosophy is the accumulation and development of knowledge, with a democratizing, not profitable, objective, from a decolonizer point of view." The word "decolonizing" is of course a slap at the United States, which I think is what the Cuban Wilkipedia is about.

It's another propaganda barrage, aimed not to convince the United States citizens that it is a horrible despotic place, but rather to tell the uninformed Cuban population that so they won't dream of more than the bare bones lifestyle the thugs have given them..In one segment of the entry on the United States, for example, describes it as the "empire of our time, which has historically taken by force territory and natural resources from other nations, to put at the service of its businesses and monopolies". "It consumes 25% of the energy produced on the planet and in spite of its wealth, more than a third of its population does not have assured medical attention," Makes you want to run to Cuba , doesn't it?

The fact that nearly every dictatorship, big and small, has it's own Wilkipedia has watered the Wilkipedia concept down eve more. First there were the false entries posted on Wilkipedia, which was followed by revisions to pages made by editors in the name of eliminating false information. Now we have a dictator's personal encyclopedia for all his or her enslaved subjects to learn all the news the dictator feels is fit to print.

But isn't that the way the internet should work? To be a truly free platform it must be subject to the rhetoric of the Cuba's of the world.