What is the legal status of dwarf tossing? Did people really worship Jesus Christ's foreskin as a relic? Where was crushing by elephant used as an execution method? And who is the mysterious galactic ruler Xenu at the heart of Scientology?

You won't find the answers in Encyclopædia Britannica. Only one place contains them all: Wikipedia. The free online encyclopedia has become the largest, most wide-ranging and most untamed reference work in history.

So how does one find experts on the Holy Prepuce, or punishment by pachyderm? Simple: let them come to you. Wikipedia is written and edited entirely by volunteers from around the world. For nearly 20,000 regular editors, the only reward is in sharing their knowledge and expertise.

Beyond the funny and bizarre, there's also the serious and scholarly. Anyone who wants to learn about the Milgram experiment, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, or Trinidad and Tobago's Democratic Labour Party will find detailed articles with extensive references. But this is no boneyard - it's also updated in real-time, with up-to-the-minute coverage of elections, hurricanes, terror attacks or other breaking news of the day.

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In a radical move, the whole encyclopedia was moved to a freely-editable wiki site. Less than five years later, Wikipedia's English edition has produced over 700,000 entries (compared with a paltry 120,000 in Encyclopædia Britannica and 68,000 in Microsoft's Encarta). In total, Wikipedia's global community has written over two million articles in more than 100 languages, including Esperanto and Sanskrit.

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Pq é um graffiare? Pq é um artigo escrito por A.J.Jacobs da revista Esquire.
E publicado na própria Wikipédia.