Laudator Temporis Acti

From a description of Wiki:

Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.

It's not only exciting, but it can be humorous as well. Here are some quotations from a Wiki article on the ancient Roman historian Tacitus (snapshot taken April 24, 2005):

Tacitus' sympathy definetly goes out to a republican state, rather than to the arbitrariness of some emperors. He writes on emperors and men in power with as well as on on persons of less importants.

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Agricola moves to the background and shall pass away in augustus 93, more or less forgoten.

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When Domitianus on 18 september 96 is murdered by his nearest invirons, the about forthy years old Tacitus is seatted as consul suffectus for the year 97 – presumably still appointed by Domitianus - in the senate.

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Tacitus has writen three minor works: De vita et moribus Iulii Agricola, a biography of his father-in-law, De origine et situ Germanorum, an ethnographic work on Germania and its inhabitants, and Dialogus de oratoribus, a phamphlet on elequonce under the principate.

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Victories that are proclaimed by successive emperors, he concludes them as being historical unfundamented propaganda of these emperors.

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The causes for this are according to him the education in general with the oratory in particular and the monarchal constitution that is good as polity an sich, but doesn't inspire the developement of grant and great grootse oratory.

I'll take the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica over this new-fangled Wiki gibberish any day.

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David Meadows (via email) points to the Dutch original. Translation software is doubtless partly to blame, but "De vita et moribus Iulii Agricola [sic]" is neither Dutch nor Latin.