I was messing with the Alaska wiki. Rosie created a great logo for the site. I thought I’d tidy up the top-level categories and create a single users category rather than two categories - Alaskans and visitors - and the site went down. The whole wikicities site went down. It was the second time today that it happened. Don’t know what that’s about. I was checking to see if wikipedia was still running. Kind of like what you do when you have a power failure. Look out the window to see if it’s just your house, or are the neighbors in this too. Wikipedia was up.

Then I just happened to notice the other mega-wiki sites at the bottom of the page:Wiktionary, Wikispecies, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki, Wikisource, and Commons. I’d seen a couple of these. I could kind of guess a couple (Wikiquotes, for instance). But Wikisource was kind of mysterious. So I followed the link. Another mystery - lots of different languages in which the main page greeting is written. I read through each of them until I fount the one I could read.

Welcome to Wikisource. This site is a repository of source texts in any language which are either in the public domain, or are released under the GNU Free Documentation License. The site is part of the Wikimedia foundation and is a sister project of Wikipedia, which is a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate, free content encyclopedia.

I clicked on it and there was another mysterious page filled with question marks. Click on a row of them and find…more question marks. There was one word, category, on the page. Click on that to find the special page that lists all of the categories The category page is an alphabetical index of about 1000 topics: Authors, Bill Clinton, British Empire, Bible, China, Constitutional Documents, Cuentos de Edgar Allan Poe, Cuentos de Franz Kafka, De:Politik, cryptic things like ES-K, Emily Dickenson Poems (alphabetical list), more cryptic items like LC-BX (after looking, I think LC means Library of Congress), and I start to “get it.” This is a site that is attempting to include everything ever written! I even found the whole novel, Huckleberry Finn. There’s Mythology, National Anthems, and I quit looking to blog about it.

And the logo shows an iceberg cross section hanging way below the surface of the sea. Very apt.

I wonder if Wikicities is up and running again?…..