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 It would be useful if you dated your comments, it's much easier to follow the dates that way, rather than checking the history. I agree with Rjstott for the purpose of Wikipedia. AN, whoever you are, you are surely a person whith a scientific background. You certainly don't need this article in Wikipedia to explain the centripetal force. I wrote the following paragraph in the article:

It is important to understand right from the start that there is no 'default', 'natural' centripetal force. By default, objects tend to move in a straight line, as Newtonian mechanics teaches, away from the 'orbit', so in this context, by default there is only a centrifugal force at work. The centripetal force is being applied either by accident (meteors orbiting a planet) or artificially (satellites orbiting Earth, the object at the end of a rope etc). Therefore, the centrifugal force is a natural component of a circular movement, while the centripetal force is what we conventionally call the force keeping the object 'in orbit'.

 That paragraph has since been removed in favor of a more scientific approach. While I can agree that the statements in my explanation might have been misleading or imprecise from a scientific perspective (which is why I didn't revert the subsequent changes), I think they are a lot easier to understand by the person who needs to be explained how the centripetal/centrifugal forces work intuitively. Again, I will not fight for that paragraph, but I would like to see something easier to understand for the casual reader in the introduction.

 Let me explain what I mean with my ""intuitiveness"" concern by using the following example: When a kid spins a rock at the end of rope he intuitively feels the centrifugal force. You will say that's not correct, he is applying the centripetal force, that's what he feels. But by that standard it would be difficult to explain gravity  following the same rationale, when you lift a suitcase you apply ""antigravity"" to it. However, the kid will intuitively feel that he's ""beating"" some force; when you explain that the downward force is called gravity and it's real, he's ready to accept that, although he's applying an upward force himself. People intuitively feel the force they need to ""beat"" as the real force; the force they apply feels like the artificial part of the equation: the upward force to beat gravity is artificial, the gravity keeping the suitcase on the ground is natural. If you explain things the other way around, you confuse the casual reader. The same applies at an intuitive level with centripetal/centrifugal forces IMHO: if you start the article with an introductory statement which says that the centrifugal force doesn't really exist, that confuses the reader (""then what's the force that I'm beating by holding on to the rope? Maybe I didn't get it right..."") and s/he's most probably going to miss the point of the whole thing long before you get to formulas.  "