36 reasons Wikipedia is the greatest invention in human history
Friday, September 12th by Ben YatesI’m stressed out about this election. “Slowly turning into Tweek” is more like it.
But Wikipedia is something that makes me happy. Not its newness or its social structure — though those things are cool — but the window it provides, the chance to examine every corner of the world.
Lists are Wikipedia’s best feature. They’re not cruft or digg-bait — they’re important. They draw seemingly disparate pieces of information together into a new picture. (And they’re easy to contribute to, which makes them the most vibrant, compelling part of Wikipedia.)
I’ve been collecting wiki lists for years. I think they prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Wikipedia is the best thing ever.
1. List of Comic Book Superpowers (94 items)
See also: Infinite Improbability Drive.
2. List of Sexually Active Popes (17 items)
3. List of oldest continuously inhabited cities (18 in the old world, 9 in the new)
“In the Pharaonic era the city was the most significant center for the cult of Sobek, the crocodile-god. In consequence, the Greeks named it Crocodilopolis, Crocodile City, from the particular reverence paid by its inhabitants to crocodiles. The city worshipped a sacred crocodile, named Petsuchos, that was embellished with gold and gems. The crocodile lived in a special temple, with sand, a pond and food. When the Petsuchos died, it was replaced by another.”
See also: List of North American cities by year of foundation. The oldest is Ticul, inhabited since 700 BC.
5. List of subcultures (63 items)
See also: List of ethnic groups in China.
7. List of states of matter (19 items, plus the gravitational singularity, which doesn’t count).
My favorite: the frictionless superfluids, which trump gravity.
8. List of unusual units of measurement (52 items, not including units invented by humorists)
“The light-nanosecond was popularized as a unit of distance by Grace Hopper as the distance which a photon could travel in one billionth of a second (roughly 30 cm or one foot): ‘The speed of light is one foot per nanosecond.’ In her speaking engagements, she was well-known for passing out light-nanoseconds of wire to the audience, and contrasting it with light-microseconds (a coil of wire 1,000 times as long) and light-picoseconds (ground black pepper).”
9. List of words having different meanings in British and American English (hundreds)
10. List of American words not widely used in the United Kingdom (hundreds)
And now, the animals.
11. List of historical elephants (38 items)
Abul Abbas (? - 810) was given to Charlemagne by the caliph of Baghdad; Hanno (c. 1510 – 1516) was given to Pope Leo X; Suleiman (1540 - 1553) was given to the Habsburg Prince Maximilian.
But others are famous on their own:
- Lin Wang served with the Chinese Expeditionary Force during the second Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and later relocated to Taiwan with the Kuomintang forces. (She survived for decades afterward. Not so lucky were Castor and Pollux, who were killed and eaten during the Siege of Paris.
- Batyr could reproduce human speech.
- Tuffi became famous in Germany in 1950 when she jumped from the suspended monorail in Wuppertal into the river below.
12. List of cats (117 famous in their own right, 218 cats of famous people, 19 wildcats)
- Pangur Bán, the subject of an 8th century Irish poem (which you can read in translation).
- Lewis, the only cat to have been placed under house arrest.
- Tama, who is officially the stationmaster of a train station in Kinokawa.
- Room 8 (1947 - 1968), named for a California classroom where he would return every fall. (His L.A. Times obituary ran three columns.)
- Unsinkable sam, a ship’s cat who survived three sinkings in world war II.
13. List of Dog Monuments (18 items)
14. List of famous trees (117 real trees, 27 fictional or mythological ones).
The runner up: The Tree That Owns Itself, “a white oak widely assumed to have legal ownership of itself and of all land within eight feet (2.4 m) of its base.”
And there are historical trees:
Thor’s Oak was sacred to the Chatti. “Its felling in 723 marked the beginning of the Christianization of the non-Frankish tribes of northern Germany.”
Major Oak is at the heart of Sherwood Forest — “according to local folklore, it was Robin Hood’s headquarters.”
And trees that are physically unique: the Chandelier Tree, which you can drive a car through, the Árbol del Tule, which is jaw-droppingly wide.
And Pando, “a clonal colony of a Aspen located in Utah, all determined to be part of a single living organism by identical genetic markers and one massive underground root system. The plant is estimated to weigh collectively 6,000 tonnes (6,615 tons), making it the heaviest known organism. The root system of Pando is claimed by some to be among the oldest known living organisms in existence at 80,000 years of age.”
15. List of paradoxes (124 items)
Philosophical paradox: A man travels back in time to discover the cause of a famous fire. While in the building where the fire started, he accidentally knocks over a kerosene lantern and causes a fire, the same fire that would inspire him, years later, to travel back in time.
Physical paradox: Why is the night sky black if there is an infinity of stars? Also, Schrödinger’s cat.
Decision paradox: When one pursues happiness itself, one is miserable; but when one pursues something else, one achieves happiness.
Geometric paradox: A simple object with finite volume but infinite surface area.
Infinitestimal paradox: 0.999… is exactly equal to one.
Statistical paradox: In lists of numbers from many real-life sources of data, the leading digit 1 occurs much more often than the others. (Note that this is rigorously proven.)
Mathematical paradox: You can have three dice, called A, B, and C, such that A is likely to win in a roll against B, B is likely to win in a roll against C, and C is likely to win in a roll against A. (See also: rock-paper-scissors analogies in nature and computing.)
16. Satellite map images with missing or unclear data (previously known as “list of places burred out on Google Maps” — 63 items).
Screwups
17. List of incidents famously considered great blunders (57 items)
18. Video games notable for negative reception (26 items)
Runner-up: E.T. Atari dumped thousands of cartridges in a landfill.
19. List of premature obituaries (hundreds)
20. List of misquotations (43 misquotations of real people, 30 of fictional characters)
21. List of people who died onstage (39 items)
And the rest.
22. List of world’s largest roadside attractions (155)
23. List of school pranks (15 items)
24. List of frivolous political parties (47 real parties, 12 in fiction)
25. List of adages named after people (112 items)
26. List of people known as father or mother of something
27. List of Discredited Substances (30 items)
28. List of obsolete scientific theories (42 totally superseded theories, 8 theories now understood to be approximations)
29. List of fictional diseases (82 items)
30. List of Six Feet Under deaths (77 at the start of each episode, 22 in the middle)
31. List of recurring characters in The Simpsons (54 items)
32. List of films that most frequently use the word “fuck” (173 items)
33. List of problems solved by MacGyver (like a million)
34. List of world’s most expensive single objects (28 items)
35. List of leading shopping streets and districts by city (hundreds)
And finally…
36. List of Unusual Wikipedia Articles
So take a breath.
The world’s greatest encyclopedia is seven years old. It’s free. And it was written entirely by volunteers working for fun, not money.
That makes me think that despite everything else, the 21st century might not turn out so bad.
September 12th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
This is fabulous! And I know it must’ve taken forever to compile and link. Thanks. Will pass it on.
September 12th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Thanks. :)
September 14th, 2008 at 3:59 am
Nice meta-list. :)
September 14th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
this is material for probably more than 4h of fascinated clicking :D
October 5th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
great list, thanks! I will write about and link to it on my blog.
http://melissadonaldsayshello.blogspot.com/
October 10th, 2008 at 12:43 am
snow crash…
Interestingly, this was on CNN last week….