Wikipedia:OpenFacts

The BerliOS OpenFacts Project is a free knowledge database for the collaborative creation of software documentation. Its founders were inspired by the Wikipedia project's approach to collaborative writing of encyclopedia articles, and use the same MediaWiki software to power the site, although they are running a very old version of mediawiki, before it was even called mediawiki.

The original intended purpose of the OpenFacts wiki was to allow any open source project to maintain their documentation collaboratively online. In addition, OpenFacts pages can also be used for feature suggestions or problem reports for other projects.

However the primary use (aside from wiki spamming) of this wiki over the years, has been to maintain a Wikipedia Status page which allows people to monitor (and of course, change) the perceived server status of Wikipedia. On the status page, Wikipedia's server status is measured in terms of speed and availability. In addition, comments are posted by most people that change the status. Some of these also provide reasons for the status, when they are known. However, following the adoption of multilingual error pages on Wikipedia, the link to Wikipedia Status was removed. An alternative offline contingency site was proposed but there has been no action yet.

The Questions and suggestions page on this wiki has, in the past, listed many requests for changes. Currently this is flushed out and there's hardly anything on there, but it still clearly indicates a failure of the site administrators to take any action or even respond to requests. It's safe to assume that site administrators have also failed to deplay any Anti-spam features, and have no plans to upgrade to a modern version of the mediawiki software. Surprisingly people (or anti-spam bots?) editing the wiki have managed to continually revert spam edits, despite constant bombardment of wiki spam.

Even so, open source project seeking a reliable wiki-style documentation space (with a 'recent changes' page which isn't plastered with spam edits), would do better looking elsewhere.

As of 10 September 2012, OpenFacts is completely offline.

The documentation material which is on there is released into the public domain unless otherwise noted.

References and external links

 * OpenFacts project
 * BerliOS homepage