Mahathir said he feared that an attack by the United States on Iran, which is insisting on pursuing nuclear capability, could trigger a global wave of suicide bombings that would create widespread insecurity.

"I went to Iran myself ... and the Iranians seem to be very determined that they will defend their country. They will not give in nor will they give up their right to do research in nuclear material," he said.

"They will fight back and I believe that they have the capacity to inflict damage on whoever attacks them."

Mahathir said without providing evidence that he had read reports of up to 14,000 suicide bombers being trained in Iran.

"They will not confine themselves to Iran. We will not know where they are and as we have seen, people who are desperate and angry will not be very particular about whom they attack," he said.

"So the world will become very insecure if Iran is attacked. Anywhere at all they may decide to take action, they may blow themselves up wherever."

Mahathir said that terrorism was the result of powerful countries attacking nations that had no other means to defend themselves, and compared their actions with independence movements during the British colonial era.

"We think that nobody should kill but there are instances where people have no other means of defending themselves -- they are being attacked using helicopter gunships, bombs, rockets etc and they are without any means of fighting back."

"They are in fact defending themselves. I'm not going to excuse them for killing children etc but one has to remember that children are also being killed by government forces," he said.

"So what is needed here is a proper perspective. If your country is being attacked, I think it's legitimate to fight back."

Chinese authorities were not immediately available for comment.

The warning gave no further details, but it comes two days after the killing in Iraq of al Qaeda militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq.

The embassy issued a similar notice in China in November, warning at that time that police had told them Islamic extremists could be planning attacks on luxury hotels in China.

China has not traditionally been a hotbed of terror attacks, but the government has accused ethnic Uighurs in its mostly Muslim northwestern region of Xinjiang of using violence to agitate for an independent East Turkestan state.

Beijing has waged a campaign against Uighur activists in an attempt to crackdown on separatist sentiment, which rights groups say has been characterized by arbitrary arrests and closed trials.

Behold, blessed children, the new and upcoming "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" video game, based on the freakishly best-selling series of apocalyptic trash-lit books. It's an ultraviolent, hilariously inept, wondrously accurate portrayal of what every true right-wing Christian fundamentalist really fantasizes about after they've had one too many pink wine spritzers and have logged a few hours in the gay chat rooms and have sufficiently indoctrinated their happily numb kids with tales of vile homos and scary "progressive" liberals who want to buy them candy and tattoo their sacrums and feed them organic hot dogs.

What's the game actually about? How do you play? I believe the pro-choice, pro-religion Talk to Action blog describes it best:

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission -- both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state -- especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice.

Ah yes, the neo-Christian ideal. The ultimate dominionist police state, a smoking, reeking, post-apocalyptic vision of New York, a world teeming with nonbelievers just waiting to be either converted or massacred by nothing less than a Christianized American Taliban, a world of righteousness and judgment and death, all in the name of one very nasty and bloodthirsty God. It's "Grand Theft Auto" for the Rick Santorum set. It's "Resident Evil 4" for American Family Association types who eat too much BGH meat and never have sex.

Is it worth delineating all the appalling whorings of Christ's true message in this thing? Do you need to imagine the explosive reaction if, say, a powerful Muslim organization came out with a major video game where Islamic fundies killed hapless Christians with machine guns in order to restore the world to Allah? Or if the KKK or Aryan Nations created a game where you get to "cleanse" 'Merka of all the Jews and blacks so happy white people can stop being so scared of hip-hop? Verily, you do not.

But it is worth mentioning that, while the vast majority of sane Christians will recoil from this silly video game as violently as any sighing Wiccan, the bad news is the 10 "Left Behind" books -- a certified phenomenon, they -- have sold nearly as many copies as "The Da Vinci Code" (upward of 40 million worldwide) and their rabid fans are legion and dominionist demagogue megapastors like Rick Warren (whose megaministry is tacitly connected to the game) and famed hatemongering homophobes like James Dobson of the AMA are indoctrinating countless new and militant Christbots into their happy shiny armies of God every single day.

We can never forget: These are the people who still whisper into Dubya's ear when he's playing with his little green army men in the White House bathtub. They have stained the Supreme Court, attacked science and open discourse, made the human female nipple a symbol of shame and humiliation. Their power may be waning slightly as BushCo crumbles, but their agenda remains deeply sickening.

But hey, everyone needs a fantasy, right? Everyone needs an outlet for their violent daydreams, even fundamentalist right-wing bonk-jobs and their hapless 13-year-old male children, for whom (presumably) this game is designed. It's venomous bigotry made fun! More good news: The game should be ready just in time for Christmas.

Oh but wait. There's a lovely kicker: When you get bored with the sanctimonious drabness of fighting on the side of a hateful Christ (which, invariably, you most certainly will), the game apparently allows you to switch modes and fight for the army of the Antichrist, unleashing cloven-hoofed demons who feast on the flesh of the righteous as you blow away Bible-thumping soldiers who, just before they die, secretly confess their intense gay love for their platoon commanders. Isn't that thoughtful?

It's also a bit of genius marketing. After all, aren't the villains always far cooler and sexier than the self-righteous and the holy? The devil always has better vodka than God. Who wants to run around shooting Buddhists and praying, when you can don the armor of hell itself and drink and have dirtyfun sex and get tattoos and listen to Metallica and wear low-slung jeans and laugh easily? No one, that's who.

Which is why the game could become the sleeper hit of the year. Sure, brainwashed fundamentalist kids will love playing on the side of God. For a while. But then the dark side will beckon. The irresistible scent of rebellion will hit their noses like hot porn pizza. They will fall into the clutches of a crazy self-defined happiness, they will squirm and giggle and feel anarchic and seditious and free, running clean in a place where the beer is cold and the dancing is hot and no one is telling them they have to kill someone because that person dared to believe that God isn't, well, a misanthropic, murderous jackass.

Now that's heaven.

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Mark Morford Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes another tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.

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More than a dozen years ago I was involved in a project to build an internet-delivered encyclopedic reference source. Those of us who worked on it were dazzled by the potential that seemed to be opening up before us. There was a worldwide communication network that anyone could use; here in hand was the most comprehensive and authoritative general reference work in the English language; and in between us and the goal that grew more ambitious each day were only some technical challenges and the limits of our imaginations. It was a wonderful time to be an encyclopedia editor.

Well, things didn't work out just as we hoped, for reasons too numerous to mention here. I recall this episode mainly to make the point that I understand the enthusiasm, the evangelism, that Wikipedia evokes in many, many people. I wish I could share it with them now. But, as David Shariatmadari's openDemocracy article "The sultan and the glamour model" (25 May 2006) shows once again, Wikipedia's most eloquent advocates fail, or refuse, to acknowledge certain issues.

Bias and imbalance

Shariatmadari's article praises the work of a group calling itself by the unfortunately self-congratulatory label Wikiproject: Countering Systemic Bias and ends with a call for more such efforts to improve the coverage of the encyclopedia. Certainly such work is needed. I would suggest that it needs to begin with a clear distinction between "bias" and "imbalance", terms that Shariatmadari uses interchangeably but that to an editor mean quite different things. The Wikiproject seems to concern itself with topics that are treated in insufficient detail or not at all; to me, this is addressing imbalance. "Bias" denotes a lack of objectivity or fairness in the treatment of topics. Thus, when a writer called Joseph McCabe alleged in a widely distributed pamphlet that certain articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica had been unduly influenced by the Catholic church, he was charging bias. (That was in 1947, and he was quite wrong, by the way.)

Is imbalance in Wikipedia "systemic"? I should rather say that it results inevitably from a lack of system. Given the method by which Wikipedia articles are created, for there to be any semblance of balance in the overall coverage of subject-matter would be miraculous. Balance results from planning. As an example, the planning of the coverage of the fifteenth edition of Britannica took an in-house staff and dozens of advisers several years to complete. That was forty years ago; it would be harder now.

It is unremarkable that the topics covered at present in Wikipedia reflect the interests of those who contribute to it, and that these contributors represent a relatively narrow, self-selected segment of society. In the absence of planning and some degree of central direction, how else could it have been?

It is well to bear in mind also that imbalance is a judgment, not a fact, and that it cannot be reduced to numbers. To say that article A is longer than article B is not to show that B has not been given its due. Some subjects require more background, more context, more sheer wordage to convey a sense of understanding to the reader. Are 260 lines too much to devote to the Scots language? Clearly, someone does not think so. Someone else might well feel that there ought to be much more. Three lines for the language of the Yi is almost certainly too few, but what is the right number? Who - I'm asking for a showing of hands here - knows? What is lacking is not some numerical standard but editorial standards: a set of principles that define what constitutes adequate treatment of various kinds of topics for an intended audience.

Truth and openness

David Shariatmadari writes that the situation is "uncannily like free market economics applied to knowledge." This is quite inapt. I suppose it is meant to shock; what could be worse than, you know, capitalism? I'll just point out that another shocking word that might properly be applied to Wikipedia is "globalist." Sorry, but I calls 'em as I sees 'em.

More seriously, a better analogy might be a children's soccer team. It is notorious that, in the United States, at least, a game involving the youngest children will consist of a swarm of twenty or so players buzzing ineffectively about the ball. As the children grow older, however, they will develop individual skills and learn to play positions and to execute strategies. Just so, traditionally, have editors honed skills, learned appropriate methods and processes, and developed the synoptic view required by the job.

No complex project can be expected to yield satisfactory results without a clear vision of what the goal is - and here I mean what a worthy internet encyclopedia actually looks like - and a plan to reach that goal, which will include a careful inventory of the needed skills and knowledge and some meaningful measures of progress. To date, the "hive mind" of Wikipedia's "digital Maoism" (as Jaron Lanier's vigorous critique on edge.org calls it) displays none of these.

That vision of the goal must do something that Wikipedia and Wikipedians steadfastly decline to do today, and that is to consider seriously the user, the reader. What is the user meant to take away from the experience of consulting a Wikipedia article? The most candid defenders of the encyclopedia today confess that it cannot be trusted to impart correct information but can serve as a starting-point for research. By this they seem to mean that it supplies some links and some useful search terms to plug into Google. This is not much. It is a great shame that some excellent work - and there is some - is rendered suspect both by the ideologically required openness of the process and by association with much distinctly not excellent work that is accorded equal standing by that same ideology.

One simple fact that must be accepted as the basis for any intellectual work is that truth - whatever definition of that word you may subscribe to - is not democratically determined. And another is that talent, whether for soccer or for exposition, is not equally distributed across the population, while a robust confidence is one's own views apparently is. If there is a systemic bias in Wikipedia, it is to have ignored so far these inescapable facts.

Robert McHenry is the former editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica. He is the author of How to Know (Booklocker, 2004) and a frequent contributor to TCS Daily. His writings have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Skeptical Inquirer, Vocabula Review, and the Chicago Tribune.

His widely-discussed article on Wikipedia, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia Blinks" was published in TCS Daily (14 December 2005)