China and other totalitarian dictatorships haven't exactly been restrained in their executions regardless of the profit motive.

If you remember when semi-protection was introduced, it was only going to apply on a short-term basis to the barest number of pages.

If you're browsing major topics on Wikipedia sometime, glance in the upper-right-hand corner at the silver lock which means that the page is semi-protected. It's gotten so common that they took to using a little generic icon instead of a text snippet explaining what's going on.

Why? Because some admin decides that His Way is the Only Way. And there we are. It'll happen here too, mark my words.

The problem is that Wikipedia can't decide what its focus is. It can't decide whether or not it's an encyclopaedia that focuses subjects of universal importance with a large number of eyes on each subject, or a central clearinghouse for pop culture and trivialities.

So what you end up with is what we have: patches of admin and users on each side defending their own little piece of ideological turf and leading to a heinously uneven project that ranges from brilliant to utterly useless.

Most of them advertise XP/Vista compatability, but that's not always entirely true. Freespace and Freespace 2, for example, say that they work with XP and Vista and do so long as your computer doesn't have more than three gigabytes of RAM. Their support was unhelpful as well: I sent in the bug report, got one message back asking me a question, I sent back an answer, and never heard from them again.

I eventually found the cause of the problem via Google, luckily. Now, in this particular case the Freespace open source project meant that I could play it anyway, but it's something to bear in mind when you're dropping six bucks on 'Redneck Rampage'.