The BerliOS OpenFacts Project is a free knowledge database for the collaborative creation of software documentation. Its founders were inspired by the Wikipedia projects approach to collaborative writing of encyclopedia articles. They chose to apply this approach the writing of software documentation. To that purpose, OpenFacts allows all open source projects to maintain their documentation collaboratively online. In addition, OpenFacts pages can also be used for feature suggestions or problem reports for other projects. All material written specifically for OpenFacts is released into the public domain unless otherwise noted.

One of its useful features is the Wikipedia Status page [1] which allows people to monitor (and of course, change) the perceived server status of Wikipedia. This is supported by Wikipedia and one of the template pages that informs a user that Wikipedia is unavailable links to that page. This page falls under the category of problem reports specified as a reason for OpenFacts' existence. On the status page, Wikipedia's server status is measured in terms of speed and availability. The speed section recommends "fast", "above average", "slow", and similar identifiers, while the availability tab uses words like, "available", "intermittent", and "mostly unavailable". This page is valuable in that it allows people to see whether their current Wikipedia experience is a function of their computer or network, or whether it is due to the Wikipedia server. 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.

See also

• Wikisource

References and External Links

• OpenFacts project
• BerliOS homepage