The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia

http://copybot.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/the-50-most-interesting-articles-on-wikipedia/

by aj • 17 years ago

91 19 17 years ago

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KaiP• 17 years ago

The Back to the Future Timeline was removed, but the diagram can be found in the discussion section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Back_to_the_Future_(film_s...

heyitsnick• 17 years ago

Thank you very much, i was searching back in the edit history but, due to all the redirects, couldn't find the original.

dbz• 17 years ago

There are lots and lots of interesting articles on Wikipedia, but I do not find the majority of these interesting.

I'm a bigger fan of the random, but interesting, articles you can use "in class".

Ex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro

klipt• 17 years ago

For fictional quirks, I usually find the tvtropes wiki more informative: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro

PieSquared• 17 years ago

Oh, Gods, TvTropes. The only thing more addictive and time consuming than Wikipedia browsing.

wlievens• 17 years ago

No way man, no way am I going back in there. Once you get sucked into TV tropes, you never ever get out.

mahmud• 17 years ago

Good lord. The second in the list is a plan by the U.S. to invade Canada, Australia, India and the UK! And the Canadians in turn had plans to invade the U.S.

Boy am I glad we found non-anglo foreigners to make enemies of.

I can't believe 1920s America would even have those big imperial ambitions. We had our skirmishes in North Africa, the Carribean and the Pacific, but never the gully to go to war with the English crown since independence.

FWIW, I met an Australian military officer and we discussed the security of Australia. He said Japan is neutered and only Indonesia and China represent eminent danger. Then he added, "if there was ever a front with Indonesia or China, 10 million redneck Americans will be flown in to help us." And I really agreed with him. Our relationship is so good, it's devastating to know we had Australia (and Canada) on our TODO list :-(

patio11• 17 years ago

I can't believe 1920s America would even have those big imperial ambitions.

It didn't. They just make great homework assignments for junior officers, for the same reason that "Write a plan for defending the United States from a sudden attack by space aliens" does. You can discuss whatever you want in the homework assignment and do it to any level of detail, but if it leaks, national security is not threatened.

Compare that to this: "The Pentagon has produced detailed plans for a nuclear attack on Tehran in response to Iran' bioterrorism, the New York Times has learned." That sort of thing starts wars, and the relevant people don't listen to "Oh for pity's sake, I just wanted Captain McSweeny to get some practice writing out nuclear logistics scenarios. We're not going to actually nuke... hold on a second... I can neither confirm nor deny that we might nuke Tehran in response to a WMD attack."

gaius• 17 years ago

The less likely a scenario is, the less time you have to make a plan when if it actually happens. The job of the General Staff in peacetime is to make sure that whatever happens, no-one panics, they reach into a filing cabinet, pull out the plan and calmly execute it. Having a plan implies no intent, as you say!

astine• 17 years ago

You know that we actually did invade Canada right?

"if there was ever a front with Indonesia or China, 10 million redneck Americans will be flown in to help us."

The South Koreans believe this too, as do the Taiwanese, the Japanese, the Poles, the French, the British, the Italians... hell the whole world. And someone comes a long and indignantly asks why Ameria spends more on defense than all other first-world nations combined? It's to make up for their slack!

dhughes• 17 years ago

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the US invaded The Maritimes, where I live.

In 1917 Halifax was devastated when two munitions ships collided causing a 3 Kiloton non-nuclear explosion (another interesting story) which resulted in a lot of eye injuries from flying glass since people looked out through windows at the burning ships when the explosion happened.

Boston sent help and ever since Halifax sends the city a Christmas tree.

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if soldiers from Boston who would certainly have vivid memories of the assistance, were to participate in dropping poison gas on the same people they helped ten or fifteen years later.

ComputerGuru• 17 years ago

Boy am I glad we found non-anglo foreigners to make enemies of.

I'm not sure what that comment was supposed to mean or what feelings it reflects so while it's clear that it was said in a joking manner it's in pretty bad taste.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

This is going to really make my post-Thanksgiving-meal-downtime more interesting :)

edge17• 17 years ago

there goes my weekend

lordgilman• 17 years ago

A reddit user also put together a similar but much longer list: http://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/9p4x9/wikipedias_...

tengkahwee• 17 years ago

On an unrelated note, is there a generic algorithm that can compute interestingness? Maybe some index to follow?

nanotone• 17 years ago

Extrapolating strictly from my own browsing behavior while reading the first few on this list, I've noticed that the more interesting I find an article, the more tabs to linked Wikipedia articles I open up for further reading.

Of course, articles with more links are likely to spawn more tabs, so this score would be expressed as a fraction of the total links in the article that were followed.

That's just for starters; none of this considers the actual text of the article. Once you throw in semantics...

EDIT: I generally don't follow links to articles on more well-known topics [e.g. places], but that shouldn't penalize the article. So there needs to be a ranking for well-known-ness, and consider the fraction of followed links to articles that are less well-known.

nl• 17 years ago

Yes there is.

1) Crawl the entire web 2) Assume that a link to a page means it is interesting in some way 3) Compute the link graph 4) Pages that are pointed to the most are the most interesting

(More advanced versions of this algorithm may implement the following steps: 2a): Discover spamming, 2b) Work out methods to combat it).

(Actually, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm is probably better because it builds in topic specificity, which allows it to match better match an individuals interests)

andylei• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Molasses_Disaster

The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia

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