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Interesting Wikipedia page mega-thread (post Wikipedia links here)
As suggested in this thread. Post links to interesting wikipedia pages and maybe a tldr with them.
As suggested in this thread. Post links to interesting wikipedia pages and maybe a tldr with them.
To post a few Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club recurring threads...it's considered kinda lame to repost them so I enjoy the opportunity to share a few:
Anti-Barney Humor
United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins
Small penis rule
Glossary of British terms not widely used in the United States
Jimmy the raven
United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls
List of lists of lists
List of inventors killed by their own inventions
List of sexually active popes
World's funniest joke
Toast sandwich
Not articles of their own but still worth checking out for a bit of entertainment value:
Talk page highlights
Lamest edit wars
Friends of gays should not be allowed to edit articles
Timeline of the far future
This one fascinates me. It starts pretty mundane, and progresses to some pretty wild stuff. As an example, it will be ~600 million years until tidal acceleration moves the Moon far enough away from the Earth that total solar eclipses are no longer possible. In this same timeframe, "the Sun's increasing luminosity begins to disrupt the carbonate–silicate cycle."
It just gets more interesting after that, IMO. I return to read this article about once a year to see what changes have been made. Always makes for a fascinating read.
I remember that one! It's one of my favourite fun wikipedia links. It feels so doctor-whovian.
Freedom to roam
In some countries its legal to enter private property to explore, camp and fish. This applies mainly to huge empty bits of land as you can't get close to buildings or disturb the owners and such. I find it really interesting how some countries put the freedom of people to explore open spaces as a higher priority than property rights.
I'll start off the thread with something interesting I found while working on coordinate systems
GCJ-02
GCJ-02 is an alternative coordinate system used on Chinese maps with the aim that they can't be used outside of china. Originally the algorithm to translate between GCJ-02 and the regular system WGS-84 was kept secret but these days you can find an implementation leaked from Google named Evil Transform.
There was also a related discussion about this on hacker news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964450
This is slightly related, but I know there are some easter eggs in the entity identifiers allocated in Wikidata.
Here are the ones I’m aware of:
Universe: Q1 (I’m not sure if Q{1..5} are really easter eggs.)
Jack Bauer: Q24
Douglas Adams: Q42
Count von Count: Q12345
If anyone knows of others, I’d love to know too.
Nanjing Massacre (nsfw)
It's terrible what was done. Mass rape and murder of several hundred thousand chinese citizens (not even soldiers) by japanese army.
What's the worst about this: I didn't learn about it at school! We are tought so much about holocaust, but not a single word about this. I think it's sad that I had to learn about this from reddit.
One would say that hundreds of thousands rapes and murders, about 80 years ago, is enough to get into textbooks.