re you a fount of knowledge about Bermuda? Then get the facts about the Island into the collaborative online encyclopaedia Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), an evolving knowledge base about everything.

Wikipedia's Bermuda section is rather poor compared to the often excellent contributions available elsewhere in the online effort. For want of knowledgeable editors and contributors the Bermuda section mostly consists of pasted in extracts from the CIA World Fact Book and from other sources (www.cia.gov).

Wikipedia is an open-source effort to create a free, reliable encyclopaedia, "indeed, the largest encyclopaedia in history", according to its founders. A "wiki" is defined as a collaborative collection of interlinked web pages, all of which can be visited and edited by anyone at any time through the online collaborative software.

Wikipedia is managed by a non-profit parent organisation, The Wikimedia Foundation, which also manages the operation of Wikipedia's sister projects, including Wiktionary (a wiki dictionary), Wikibooks (free textbooks) and others.

Users create accounts and begin building the knowledge base on particular topics of their interest. Users with ordinary access, including visitors who haven't signed in can still do most things, including the most important: editing articles and helping with Wikipedia maintenance tasks. Only signed-up users can upload files or rename pages.

The rules? Adhere to a neutral point of view and back up your factual claims with references. All you need is to know how to edit a page and have some encyclopaedic knowledge you want to share.

You can learn who is responsible for the most recent versions of any given page by clicking on the "Page history" link. But if you spot an error in the latest revision of an article you are encouraged to correct it. This practice is one of the basic review mechanisms that maintains the reliability of the encyclopaedia. As it is collaborative effort there are now thousands of users who contribute to the pages and who weed out the errors.

Once you have proven yourself over a certain period of time you can move the up hierarchy at Wikipedia and become a Wikipedian. Administrators are Wikipedians who have "sysop rights". Current Wikipedia policy is to grant this access to anyone who has been an active Wikipedia contributor for a while and is generally a known and trusted member of the community.

You may also be granted "Bureaucrat" status. Bureaucrats can turn other users into sysops (but not remove sysop status). Bureaucrats are created by other bureaucrats on projects where these exist or by stewards on those who don't yet have one.

Users with "steward" status can change the access of any user on any Wikimedia project. This includes granting and revoking sysop access, and marking users as bots. "Developer" status is granted to those for those who can make direct changes to the Wikipedia software and database.

One of course should never rely completely on online information and should always check other reference sources for accuracy. However, Wikipedia seems to actually work most of the time because of the amount of users on the lookout for errors.

When the process does break down, users are invited to post a large "The neutrality of this article is disputed" sign at the start of the article. The sign is linked to a discussion page. For example there is a hot discussion on some of the bias in choosing the events deemed most important in the round-up of events in 2004.

In the "talk" section users round up on a British poster who sadly seems to have deleted what he calls events in "banana republics". One critic notes quite rightly that "Astrotrain" the offending poster "is free to add items, but deleting notable changes in heads of state, heads of government, and constitutions (as Astrotrain has done for Indonesia, Cambodia, Belarus, Somalia, and Burma) is seriously weakening the value of this encyclopaedia article."

Astrotrain replies with a vigorous defence of the importance even the smallest events in the lives of the British monarchy, only serving to make himself more ridiculous. It's a very funny and revealing discussion, giving a good indication of what we should be aware of when reading any dictionary.

For the most part however, most of the articles are of high quality, so get in there and start making a proper and comprehensive section on all things Bermudian. You'll be adding to history.

Do you have any friends in the UK? Then you can find out online how much they paid for their house through the Land Registry's new online data source (www.landregisteronline.gov.uk).

While the online availability of the data might seem a breach of privacy, the aim is to make house pricing "transparent" (in the words of the economists) to would-be buyers and sellers. This should make the UK's housing market more competitive as buyers and seller would be able to look-up how much a house was bought for and for how much similar houses in a neighbourhood were sold.

For a ?2 fee payable online users will be able to check out who owns a particular property and how much was paid for it. In addition, the website will allow people to see a property's boundaries and any restrictions put on its use though a map.

The information has been available to the public for almost 10 years but only to people who put in a written request or dropped into one of the Land Registry's offices.

Of course people are worried about their privacy not the information is online. However the registry is not searchable by name, only by house or street, so you cannot go on a wild celebrity hunt.

I note that Bermuda's Ministry of Works and Engineering and Housing's survey section has the online beginnings of a similar information source at www.addresses.gov.bm. Survey's online "Address Finder" allows you to bring up a map of a particular property, but that's about it. There is no information given about the property's owner and about the previous sale price. Might that be next? Bermuda's journalists are sharpening their knives.

Contact Ahmed at ahmed.elamin@wanadoo.fr. Go to www.SecureBermuda.com for computer security updates.