Free Republic

It was around March of 1974, right around the time that Nixon and Watergate was in the news day after day after day. I was in the fifth grade and not much up to speed on Watergate and why Nixon was in such big trouble over it. I was more concerned about The Partridge Family, my favorite show at the time, going off the air. I wanted to be Danny and to be able to play tricks on Reuben Kincaid. My mother used to go grocery shopping over at the Finast - also known as "The First National" - a...

IT has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it’s an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star. Just don’t count on being able to thumb through the printed pages of an encyclopedia to do it. A series of announcements from publishers across the globe in the last few weeks suggests that the long migration to the Internet has picked up pace, and that ahead of other books, magazines and even newspapers, the classic multivolume encyclopedia is well on its way to becoming the first casualty in the end of print...

“Tired of the LIBERAL BIAS every time you search on Google and a Wikipedia page appears? Our study suggests that Wikipedia is 6 times more liberal than the American public. Now it’s time for the Conservatives to get our voice out on the internet!” So begins the rallying cry for Conservapedia.com, aspiring right-leaning rival to Wikipedia.org - the online encyclopedia project that now claims 7.2 million articles in 251 languages and traffic that ranks it among the world’s top 15 sites. Wikipedia is adamant about striving to maintain a “neutral point of view.” But because it is “written collaboratively by...