I hadn’t realized that Sen. John McCain was on Twitter as @SenJohnMcCain, but with 127,000+ followers I am going to assume that it’s the real one and @JohnMcCain at ~6,700 followers is just a supporter. Given McCain’s war injuries it’s unlikely he’s typing these up himself (all updates are “from web”) but it’s nevertheless official, and the following tweet was just featured on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal a few moments ago:

I wasn’t familiar with the project, but a quick Google search reveals that he is obviously talking about the Online Nevada Encyclopedia.

Although I tend to share McCain’s skepticism that an encyclopedia of state history is something the federal government should be funding, my Wikipedia-specific thought was: Wikipedia guidelines may well not allow many of the articles the Nevada Humanities organization might want to create. In fact, Wikipedia suggests to frustrated newcomers that if Wikipedia doesn’t fit their goals, then perhaps starting another wiki is the way to go (where Jimmy Wales’ for-profit Wikia is theoretically poised to benefit).

Upon closer inspection, this putative New Mexico “encyclopedia” is not itself presented as a wiki, the writing style is far different and the so are the citation styles. The site runs to perhaps a few hundred articles at most so it’s highly conceivable that many or most could be rewritten and included in Wikipedia. But somehow I doubt Nevada would get a federal grant to do that.