There is, however, an expectation that Wikipedia editors will present information about a person (or any topic, for that matter) in a way that is proportionate to its relevance and importance. Under- or (especially) over-stating the importance of particular facts to give a coloured perspective isn't on; see the section of Wikipedia's neutral-point-of-view policy on Due and undue weight.

In other words, if George W. Bush's biography opened with

It would be an undeniably true statement that nevertheless failed to comply with Wikipedia policy.

Similarly, Wikipedia's policy against using Wikipedia as a venue to publish original research specifically forbids "synthesis of published material". That is, you can't cherry-pick a bunch of sources (or parts of sources) and use them to state - or imply - a particular novel conclusion that hasn't been presented by a reliable, independent source. I could go on at length, but suffice it to say that Wikipedia content is ruled by far more than "It appeared in the newspaper so we have to put in Wikipedia".

[citation needed].

Here's the current article: Medieval Warm Period. It has a couple of pages of detailed text, a pair of graphs of temperature records, and three photographs of locations or artifacts relevant to the MWP's effect on human history. The article has 41 footnotes, mostly to peer-reviewed journal articles.

Five years ago: 2009 version. A little over a page, one graph, one photo. 25 footnotes.

For fun, ten years ago: 2004 version. Six paragraphs (three of which are a single sentence). Zero figures, zero photographs. Just 4 inline references.

Scrolling through the article's editing history I don't find any period where anyone "erased" the MWP, aside from some short-lived vandalism. At no point is there any intimation in the article that the MWP didn't occur or was otherwise not a real thing. The article appears to have grown steadily in length, quality, and detail over the last decade, but its central points appear to have remained essentially unchanged. Your comment, however, appears quite typical of climate change deniers--boldly stating things that are patently untrue in order to gain the emotional support of people who don't fact-check you, while wasting the time of the people who do.

The defamation laws and precedent which apply depend on the jurisdiction in which suit was filed, not on where the defendants live. And the second sentence of the article indicates that suit was filed in Ventura County Superior Court: in other words, California.

(Indeed, it might be preferable for a defendant to live in the UK; depending - very much - on the particular details of the case, a California court may dismiss a defamation suit against a UK defendent due to the court's lack of personal jurisdiction. Or, in the event of judgement in favour of the plaintiff against a large number of defendants, the plaintiff may decide that actually trying to extract payment from a person in another country isn't worth the time, effort, and additional billable hours.)

You raise some good points and you may be right, but I wondering if this is actually a sign that the CCP is losing control over the PLA (People's Liberation Army). For years to keep the military at their beck and call, the CCP has been working the propaganda machine into overdrive. My experience is that the average Chinese person, at least those in the big cities and not rural people, doesn't really trust the government or believe everything they say, but the propaganda works really well for those who join the PLA. I feel that China's military is pretty unprofessional and looking to start trouble and this is because they've been indoctrinated to believe that everybody is against good old China because of jealousy and if China doesn't fight tooth and nail for everything, they'll wind up with nothing. Throw in a few references to treaties they don't like that were signed in the 1800s (none of which are in force today, by the way) to bolster the claim that they've always been the victim and you have a military that acts like a rabid dog. Also, it doesn't help that the constitution of China pledges the PLA to defend the CCP, not China itself. So the CCP is at once both the state and more important than the state at the same time. It may be that all these years of indoctrination are bearing their inevitable ugly fruit now and they have to keep them busy building islands so they don't try to force an invasion of Taiwan, something that would possibly result in the US and Japan attacking China over.

This is a pissing war. Both sides may be sincere and well intentioned, but it's still a pissing war. Here's a manager type summary. I'll use TC to represent the TC developer who responder and Forkers for the person representing the people who want to fork it.

Forkers: We'd like your permission to fork your code and get the rights to it. We could just fork it without your permission and others no doubt will if you refuse to comply. We want your trademarks and your OK to put the forked code into a different license then you used. We've started looking at your code and while we do agree that there are problems there that desperately need to be fixed, we feel strongly that fixing your broken code is a million times easier than writing this from scratch. So will you play ball with us?
TC: Our code is so broken that you need to start from scratch. That's why we abandoned it - didn't think it was possible to fix without doing a complete re-write. So no, we're not going to "play ball".

Reading between the lines here, it seems fairly probable that Truecrypt has either

a) Very serious security bugs, or
b) Had backdoors introduced by the NSA.(Does Truecrypt use elliptic curve cryptography?)

In either event the code is basically tainted and shouldn't be used for any future projects.

The vague and sometimes bizzare nature of the statements from the Truecrypt dev team, including this one, lead me to believe that they have been placed under a standard NSA gagging order and have decided to burn Truecrypt rather than see it be turned against its users. Comments like "Forking is Impossibe" appear to be an open code for communicating that they are essentially unable to communicate, but that Truecrypt is no longer a trustworthy piece of software.

Reading though the Lavabit case, it's clear that those placed under NSA gagging orders have very, very little room for legal/media maneuver, but nevertheless still retain the freedom to walk away from their projects and tell others not to use them. Such actions appear to be the last defense of cryptographers in the US, and I think that is what we're seeing with Truecrypt.

Actually, I think you're wrong on both accounts. The military in China is a little bit crazy. Did you know that they are pledged by the constitution to support the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) rather than China itself? Think about that for a while. The civilian CCP government does control the PLA (People's Liberation Army), but for years now the PLA has been gaining in influence. I'm not sure even the CCP government really cares all that much about its provocations any more because they don't believe anybody will stand up to them, not even the USA.

China and North Korea are stuck with each other. Russia had the good sense to get out of that crazy game of financially supporting them early in Yeltsin's presidency, and that left China holding the bag. China doesn't have as much influence as you might think, nor do they use what little they have as well as they could. It's not well known by the public, but China has a lot of business deals with North Korea where basically they get rare earths and other minerals for below market rates. These deals are very important to China and are the main reason they prop up North Korea. China is really tired of North Korea behaving badly and causing trouble in its backyard, but they fear even more a united democratic Korea that might (who knows?) have US troops stationed in it near the Chinese border. So like it or not, they are committed firmly to the status quo because it represents a "least evil" option to them. When China says that they want a nuclear free Korean peninsula, they are quite sincere about that. They don't trust North Korea to maybe not use a nuke against them in anger or by mistake as their missile systems might simply go the wrong way and blow up in China by accident. But they aren't willing to do anything to get rid of the Kims and the Kims aren't getting rid of their nukes because they believe that their family survival depends on it. The only ways that North Korea is ever going to be nuclear free is that either the US is going to attack them and gamble that they can destroy their few nuclear missiles before they leave North Korean airspace or (much less likely) the regime will collapse quickly for some unforeseen reason and the new government will get rid of the nukes.

Actually, it's not likely at all that either Japan or South Korea "have a few they don't talk about". Do I believe that both countries could possibly produce a nuclear weapon? Yes. But untested nukes are useless because they may not work. Neither country has ever carried out a test. Believe me, if they did, you would know about it. South Korea seems a bit iffier here because they've had some satellite launch problems so I've got a hunch that they may not necessarily be ready right now to make a nuke. With time? Yes. Absolutely. If I had to bet on it right now, I'd bet that Japan could probably produce one that would work correctly on a first try. The only only other country in Asia that was ever rumored to have nuclear weapon capability was Taiwan because they were strongly suspected of helping Israel and South Africa do nuclear testing decades ago, but as a Taiwan watcher I can say that if they ever had the capability, they abandoned it and it would be very difficult to impossible for them to quickly get that going again. In fact, I feel pretty confident that they don't have even one nuclear weapon and there is a chance that they simply don't have as much knowledge as Israel and South Africa did at the time. South Africa willingly became a nuclear free state but if you look carefully you find things where SA government officials admit that they know how to make nuclear weapons, but they chose not to do so.

For those who don't understand the reference, the Keystone Cops were incompetent policemen in a series of American silent movies. I read the article linked to in the article and basically Nokia dropped the money off in a paper bag in a parking lot and the police watched the pickup and then completely lost the blackmailer. To this day they have no idea at all who got the money and it seems that Nokia has only the word of the blackmailer that they wouldn't use the keys for nefarious purposes.

Good morning, Mr. Rip Van Winkle. There are mobile phones that run an OS called Android that you seem not to have heard of but exactly meet your criteria. You might want to check that out. You can actually buy those in the USA right now.

I was there in South Africa for the World Cup. Were you? If not, you don't get to pass off rumors as facts. And if you're one of those racist Afrikaners, your opinion means nothing because a lot of you are still living in the past.

I don't know where this "They almost literally declared martial law" stuff comes from. I stayed in the home of some South African friends, who by the way would have been classified as "colored" in the old Apartheid system, and other than having a lot more tourists, it was pretty much life goes on as usual there. I didn't see any unusual numbers of police or military anywhere. I went to two different major cities and even went with a friend to Kruger National Park for a few days and at no time did I see any unusual number of police or military, nor did I hear on the local news about tourists being the victims of crime. Yes, I'm sure that somewhere some tourist there got victimized in some way, but this suggestion that there was plenty of crime that got covered up is just nonsense. Your reference to the "mainstream media" troubles me quite a bit because that could suggest that you get your information from sources that the majority of us feel are unreliable and too politically oriented.

I can't speak for other countries where things may be different, but the US rules on exclusion that the Red Cross uses get more and more exclusionary every year and are now a bit nuts in my opinion. I was a regular blood donor and they used to call me and tell me that they liked to get my blood because it was "unusually clean" and was very suitable for giving to infants. Early this year I tried to donate and they deferred me for a year. Want to know why? It's because I rode on a train for no more than 60 minutes through a "malaria area". I traveled last year to China and I took a train ride of not more than 60 minutes between two large towns. The towns themselves were fine, but the area between them is supposedly a "malaria risk area". Even though I have had zero symptoms they consider my blood to be "at risk for malaria" and I can't donate until 1 year after the trip. So I'm sorry infants, but no blood from me for a while. The Red Cross had a worker who called me a few days after my deferral to talk to me about it and I told her that I felt that the Red Cross was far too exclusionary and she said she agreed with me, but there was nothing she could do about it. OK, maybe some of you will say that while there is little chance I have malaria, it's not zero and they need to be careful. OK, maybe - maybe - you have a point. Maybe. But are you aware that since last year there have been new exclusionary rules on women and now in the USA the majority of women who have ever been pregnant, even if they lost the baby, now cannot ever donate blood? Pregnant women may contain some kind of anti-body that a small number of blood recipients react violently towards so they've decided to ban something like 75% of pregnant women from ever donating again because that's about how many have this anti-body. It's going to reach the point where the only people the Red Cross in the US will ever take blood from are men who have never traveled outside the US even once. I predict that will be the next restriction.

It's even worse then you think. Here's the story that many believe on why it really got started.

EC Publications had a successful line of comics in the early 1950s that changed the industry. EC was very successful and they had some of the best artists ever to work in the comics such as Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, Wally Wood, etc. EC's most successful comics were 3 horror comics - Tales From The Crypt, The Haunt Of Fear, and The Vault Of Horror. Anybody remember the old HBO TV series "Tales From The Crypt"? Well, they licensed the title and the concept from EC and even had some episodes based on stories that ran in the comics. EC had other comics such as crime story, war story and sci-fi. All are considered classics.

In an effort to give editor/writer/artist Harvey Kurtzman a chance to earn more money by giving him another comic to edit, Mad was created - as a comic book, not a magazine. Mad became a gigantic success and spawned quite a few imitators, including EC's own official imitation of Mad comic (yes, they really advertised it as such), Panic. Mad the comic did a lot of comics parodies and one they parodied was Archie. The story was called Starchie and they turned him into a juvenile delinquent. Now it is true that at the time some psychologists were actually suggesting that the reason so many kids were "juvenile delinquents" were that comics were warping their poor little minds. Desperate parents latched onto this explanation and the US Senate actually held hearings on it.

The story goes that the guy who published Archie just completely lost his mind over the Mad parody. In his fury, he got some other creators of (mostly less successful than EC) comics to create the Comics Code to "save the kids". Think about the children! Won't somebody think about the children! Well, it just so happens that the Code specifically forbade the use of certain words in comic book titles that just happened to be ones used by EC and they specifically forbade the types of stories that EC published. Was it coincidence? Revenge? I lean towards the latter. Remember, the US was a much less litigious place in those days. People didn't sue over anything and if you tried that, it often didn't work. EC responded by dropping all of their titles except Mad and putting out a new series of comics that had high quality art and conformed to the Code, but as these were nothing like their previous comics, they failed and nobody bought them. EC made one last gasp attempt to avoid the code with a series of "picto-fiction" magazines that had a few drawings and were mostly text, but nobody wanted those either. Mad became a magazine to avoid the Code altogether and the comics line was killed off by EC. So basically the story is that the Comics Code came into being to specifically punish EC Publications for doing a parody of Archie with the cover story being that the Code was there to "protect the children". Mad's original creator Harvey Kurtzman got into trouble with Archie again in the early 1960s when he did another parody starring Goodman Beaver and called "Goodman Goes Playboy". This parody featured Archie and various other characters now living the Playboy lifestyle. Archie's publisher sued again and forced a settlement where the copyright got transferred to him. The story vanished for decades but the copyright failed to be renewed and it's actually in the public domain now, one of the rare things that passed into public domain before the dreaded Bono Act made copyright renewal automatic.

You don't understand the event sequence, so you are wrong. It went like this.
1) Snowden steals a bunch of documents in secret. He flies to Hong Kong. At this point, nobody knows anything about him or what he has done except Snowden himself.
2) While in Hong Kong, Snowden gives a bunch of documents to various members of the press and holds a press conference to announce what he has done and to point out that he "had" to do it because it was the only way to let the American people know the truth.
3) The US government wakes up and realizes it has a really big problem on its hands. It's only now that the "traitor" charges begin and the US leans on China to send him back, instead prompting China to turn a blind eye as Russia agrees to make this its problem and headache to deal with. This gets China off the hook, although the Chinese have surely previously copied Snowden's stuff and possibly reached a deal with the USSR, cough cough, I mean Russia to share with each other what they find out.

Launch the data into oputer space on a satellite, programmed to transmit the data after a set time period. For best results, send the machine on a massive period orbit to the outer solar system, or in a pinch, crash land it it on the Moon or Mars.

Governments will either have to give up, or else fund massive space project. Either way, we win.