I love reading intriguing, interesting, amusing, weird, scary, or even morbid Wikipedia pages. What are some of the best reads you know of?
Here are some of mine…
This list includes well known paradoxes, grouped thematically. The grouping is approximate, as paradoxes may fit into more than one category. This list collects only scenarios that have been called a paradox by at least one source and have their own article in this encyclopedia. Although considered paradoxes, some of these are simply based on fallacious reasoning (falsidical), or an unintuitive solution (veridical). Informally, the term paradox is often used to describe a counter-intuitive resu...
Each entry on this list of common misconceptions is worded as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. These entries are concise summaries of the main subject articles, which can be consulted for more detail.
A common misconception is a viewpoint or factoid that is often accepted as true but which is actually false. They generally arise from conventional wisdom (such as old wives' tales), stereotypes, superstitions, fallacies, a misunderstanding of science, ...
A fallacy is reasoning that is logically invalid, or that undermines the logical validity of an argument. All forms of human communication can contain fallacies.
Because of their variety, fallacies are challenging to classify. They can be classified by their structure (formal fallacies) or content (informal fallacies). Informal fallacies, the larger group, may then be subdivided into categories such as improper presumption, faulty generalization, and error in assigning causation and relevance, a...
Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment. They are often studied in psychology, sociology and behavioral economics.
Although the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them. Several theoretical causes are known for some cognitive biases, which provides a classification of biases by their common generative mechanism (such as noisy...
Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment. They are often studied in psychology, sociology and behavioral economics.
Although the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them. Several theoretical causes are known for some cognitive biases, which provides a classification of biases by their common generative mechanism (such as noisy...
This list of wrongful convictions in the United States includes people who have been legally exonerated, including people whose convictions have been overturned or vacated, and who have not been retried because the charges were dismissed by the states. It also includes some historic cases of people who have not been formally exonerated (by a formal process such as has existed in the United States since the mid 20th century) but who historians believe are factually innocent. Generally, this mea...
Specific articles:
Joyce Carol Vincent (19 October 1965 – December 2003) was an English woman whose death went unnoticed for more than two years as her corpse lay undiscovered at her bedsit in north London. Prior to her death, she had cut off nearly all contact with those who knew her. She resigned from her job in 2001, and moved into a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. Around the same time, she began to reduce contact with friends and family. She died sometime in December 2003. Her remains were discovered ...
"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher" is an English sentence used to demonstrate lexical ambiguity and the necessity of punctuation,
which serves as a substitute for the intonation, stress, and pauses found in speech.
In human information processing research, the sentence has been used to show how readers depend on punctuation to give sentences meaning, especially in the context of scanning across lines of text. The sentence is The sentenc...
The video game crash of 1983 (known as the Atari shock in Japan) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985, primarily in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of video game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality, as well as waning interest in console games in favor of personal computers. Home video game revenues peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983, then f...
What are some lists or articles you like and think are interesting or what not? The longer the article, the better.
Wikipedia: Unusual articles
Of the over six million articles in the English Wikipedia there are some articles that Wikipedians have identified as being somewhat unusual. These articles are verifiable, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something one would not expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica. We should take special care to meet the highest standards of an encyclopedia with these articles lest they make Wikipedia appear idiosyncratic. If you wish to add an article to this ...
You will find such topics as…
Buildings prized for their uselessness.
Questions…
I’ve spent many hours purusing this page and the associated links:
Lists of people who disappeared include those whose current whereabouts are unknown, or whose deaths are unsubstantiated. Many people who disappear are eventually declared dead in absentia. Some of these people were possibly subjected to enforced disappearance, but there is insufficient information on their subsequent fates.
snoe
September 14, 2016, 6:43pm
8
An outside source: the Onion AV Club has an occasional feature called Wiki Wormhole .
With more than 5.2 million articles, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource, whether you’re throwing a term paper together at the last minute, or determining America’s readiness for some football. We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 5,237,086-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
Some entries are more interesting than others, but I like how the features follow the real-life way we read hypertext for fun, clicking on links that take us to random places.
In line with your had_had_had article.
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence in English that is often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought.
The sentence employs three distinct meanings of the word buffalo:
A semanticall...
I read this article today (her 137th birthday) and found it to be very interesting. I find it mind boggling that birth control has only been legal in the US for 50 years
Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins; September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966), also known as Margaret Sanger Slee, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Sanger used her writings and speeches primarily to promote her way of thinking. She was prosec...
Do you know about Wikipedia’s list of lists of lists ?
