This map by Redditor brisywisy, featured in today’s Now I Know newsletter, shows every location that has a geotagged Wikipedia article. Compare to a population scattermap:
How exciting would it be to see Southeast Asia, Western Africa, and South America fill in?
And then we won’t have to travel anywhere before making sweeping generalizations about them in term papers!
The Wikipedia “In popular culture” guessing game: Guess what song’s entry this is from.
- The song was featured in the 2010 film Due Date during a scene in which Danny McBride beats up the film’s two protagonists. Wilson says that he while he wasn’t “bummed” about the song’s usage in the film, he would not have approved said usage if he had been personally asked because the scene it was used in was very violent.
- The song was prominently featured in the 2011 film Friends with Benefits where Justin Timberlake’s character erroneously says the song was by Third Eye Blind.
- The song was featured as background music for the 90s themed high school reunion in the 2012 film American Reunion.
- The song was featured as background music for the closing scenes of Freeriders, a 1998 extreme ski movie from Warren Miller.
New game for nerds: Identify the Wikipedia article subject by its “In popular culture” section
This poem has been cited in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver as one of Adah’s favorite poems.
The poem is recited in the 2010 Woody Allen movie You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger by Josh Brolin’s character to Naomi Watts’s character. Like William Carlos Williams, Brolin’s character is also a physician turned writer. The poem is also recited in an interchange between Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker in the 2008 movie Smart People.
The poem is recited in the 2012 John Green novel The Fault in Our Stars by the main character Hazel Lancaster to Augustus Waters.
The poem has been cited as the favorite poem of Ezra Koenig and Andrew Breitbart.
Wikipedia Gender - female/male number of editors in wikipedia articles
Before you turn on any data points, note how the graph is shaped: the center-line is the average ratio of 12 males : 1 female editor. The pink line is the general population of Wikipedia (6.7 males : 1 female), and the blue line on the very left of the graph is 1:1.
There is precisely one article in this sample that has more female authors than male authors.
Gorgeous interactive graph. The Wikipedia entry for “female” has about 6.5 male editors for every female editor.
NPR points out VP candidates' Wikipedia pages often get "cleaned" just before they're announced.
Reddit sees this, starts reverting edits of Senator Rob Portman’s Wikipedia page — edits that simply deleted relevant and well-sourced controversies about Portman, and are thus against typical Wikipedia policy.
“[Then-president Teddy Roosevelt] voiced displeasure with and disbelief of London’s descriptions of dog fighting in White Fang, as well as Long’s stories about Wayeeses the wolf taking down prey; Roosevelt was so specific as to debate the depicted outcome of the fights based on the size of the animals involved.”
Nature fakers controversy - Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s featured entry today is amazing. It’s about a debate between naturalists, scientists, and writers about whether it was OK to fictionalize nature in fiction, and whether some writers were passing off nature fiction as fact.
It was the Million Little Pieces of its time, with the President jumping in with a magazine interview, and author William J. Long discrediting Roosevelt as “a man who takes savage delight in whooping through the woods killing everything in sight.”
“In 2009, Claire Boucher and her then-boyfriend from Tennessee constructed a 20-foot houseboat, named the “Velvet Glove Cast in Iron,” with the intention to sail it down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans. The cargo included chickens, a typewriter, 20 pounds of potatoes and a gifted copy of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Boucher and her companion adopted the names “Varuschka” and “Zelda Xox” for the trip.[8] Due to engine trouble and subsequent harassment from the Minnesota police, the journey was cut short and the houseboat and chickens were impounded.”
Grimes (musician) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
delete your houseboat.
When Wikipedia citations work as measures of how high someone was
