If it were a stunt, I doubt they would identify as The Yes Men while pulling it.

Funny, but I think you mean invade. Austria was annexed, Poland was invaded :-)

HTML is markup, not programming. And PHP? Come on.

OOXML is approved by ISO as an open standard, after all.

If you want an exhastive list of companies, check the yellow pages. I can certainly sympathise with your friend; writing a well-referenced article is hard work. However, with some training it is very easy to tell the good-faith articles from the advertising. They use enthusiastic one-sided language and meaningless buzzwords, they have trademark symbols in them, and every now and then they are actually just cut-and-paste jobs. I, for one, mostly care about fighting the spam. It's easy to imagine Wikipedia degrading into a spam pool like Usenet or email if it's not being looked after. Spammers ruin everything they can.

Oh, I am not an admin, I'm just reasonably skilled at navigating Wikipedia's web of process.

I am one of these elusive deletionists. I am motivated by the huge amounts of spam articles being put into Wikipedia these days, articles almost unambiguously meant to drive customers to the company. Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world, and a Wikipedia article will shoot your company right to the top of Google. One CTO of a company posted such an article and told me that they found visitors who came to their website from Wikipedia stayed many times longer than people who found them through Google. These people are single-purpose, have enormous conflicts of interest, and have no interest in Wikipedia beyond what it can do for their companies' bottom lines.

This pisses me off because I have frustration issues in my life that I am unable to channel in other ways. I could start martial arts training or yoga, but Wikipedia is much more available.

If the software has changed the world many times over, some independent, reliable source should have covered it, and that source could be cited to indicate notability. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not just a repository of information.

(Yes, I am one of those deletionist bastards destroying Wikipedia (and I'm also a fan of the demoscene))

It's all about picking a good mirror. I use one from my own city, and I saturated my DSL while upgrading. Meanwhile, our national mirror was (and still is) bogged down.

I cannot in good conscience buy from someone who doesn't know a slash from a backslash, sorry.

The downtime lasted 30 minutes, and most domains were probably cached by nameservers anyway.

Of course not. You can challenge the policy all you want, and if you don't succeed, you can take the whole damn Wikipedia database and start a competitor.

I, for one, agree with Wikipedia policies. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and that requires a certain amount of notability and a certain amount of verifiability.

There was no "clear consensus"; most of the people commenting were new or low-volume users who could not argue for keeping the article ("it's good information" is not sufficient for a Wikipedia article to exist). The AfDs were clearly off-site campaigns. I've been around Wikipedia AfDs enough to see that this is no conspiracy.

If you can't establish notability, it's not notable, as easy as that. Saying that other stuff exists is specifically not an argument against deletion.

Trademarks and copyrights are two entirely different concepts.

You're modded "Troll", but I agree with you (except "alas" is not the same as "at last"). I stuck with 3.5 until 4.2. I tried both 4.0 and 4.1, but they were just too unstable and lacked too many features for me to be productive and content. 4.2 was good enough to use. It was a little rough around the edges, but the 4.2.x versions fixed many things. Lately I've been using the 4.3 RC versions, and they've been great. Not only do I not miss anything, but it has some new features that are really useful (e.g., alt-f2 can not only start programs, it can convert currency and units, look up dictionary words, and much more). I still get some weird crashes, possibly plasma-related, that makes me have to restart KDE perhaps once a week, but other than that, I'm pleased as punch.