Interesting Wikipedia articles?

Interesting Wikipedia articles?

Author
Discussion

glazbagun

14,838 posts

212 months

Thursday 25th January 2024
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Not a wiki, but a great news article from 2002 when some journalists went bin raking after a DA declared that American's rubbish was not private property if it's put out on the street for collection.

https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-1616-rubbis...

Actually made me nostalgic for the days when we were outraged that we might not be able to maintain our privacy.

andy_s

19,710 posts

274 months

Sunday 28th January 2024
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This may be of interest, a map-based wiki search - "Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia" - NearbyWiki.org

andy_s

19,710 posts

274 months

Monday 15th July 2024
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymor...

"In materials science, a disappearing polymorph is a form of a crystal structure that is suddenly unable to be produced, instead transforming into a different crystal structure with the same chemical composition (a polymorph) during nucleation."

Ice-9 yikes

Sway

31,951 posts

209 months

Saturday 20th July 2024
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Quite a fun one, and I give zero sts about the accuracy of instruments, they can have it!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Warrimoo

Shame there's not an equivalent from NYE 1999, as that would have added 'and in two millenia' to the claim!

hairy v

1,329 posts

159 months

Tuesday 17th September 2024
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Possibly NSFW

Artist's poo

€124,000!


caseys

331 posts

183 months

GliderRider

2,682 posts

96 months

Thursday 10th October 2024
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A self-powered supercharger that doubles engine power, plus others

Turbonique

Roofless Toothless

6,558 posts

147 months

Sunday 23rd February
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Jules_Boulang...




Pierre Jules Boulanger was boss of Citroen during the Second World War. Not impressed by the Germans requisitioning his factory to build military vehicles, he hit upon several ways of sabotaging the arrangement.

The most ingenious was to equip trucks with special dipsticks, on which the oil level marker notches had been significantly lowered. When the German mechanics topped up the oil levels to what they thought was the correct height, they were in fact leaving the engines dangerously short of lubricant. The trucks began breaking down with alarming regularity, hampering the war effort of the invading army.

vaud

55,102 posts

170 months

Sunday 23rd February
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That’s fascinating- thanks for that.

Frimley111R

17,082 posts

249 months

Wednesday 16th April
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Very cool circular bridge in Uruguay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laguna_Garz%C3%B3n_B...

awooga

434 posts

149 months

Sunday 27th April
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There's surely some ideas to edit into this....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopalpa_donaldtrump...

It has blonde hair and very small genitalia.

Fer

7,752 posts

295 months

Sunday 1st June
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Super Sonic

9,564 posts

69 months

Sunday 1st June
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GliderRider said:
A self-powered supercharger that doubles engine power, plus others

Turbonique
Rocket turbine back axle!

MissChief

7,528 posts

183 months

Monday 2nd June
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Fer said:
I was reading this and thinking it must have been from even the 1800's, or maybe early 1900's. 1994!

mikey_b

2,325 posts

60 months

Monday 2nd June
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MissChief said:
Fer said:
I was reading this and thinking it must have been from even the 1800's, or maybe early 1900's. 1994!
And in a zoo!! With 'medical care provided by the zoo's vetinarians'! What on earth were they thinking?

2xChevrons

3,929 posts

95 months

Monday 2nd June
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Roofless Toothless said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Jules_Boulang...




Pierre Jules Boulanger was boss of Citroen during the Second World War. Not impressed by the Germans requisitioning his factory to build military vehicles, he hit upon several ways of sabotaging the arrangement.

The most ingenious was to equip trucks with special dipsticks, on which the oil level marker notches had been significantly lowered. When the German mechanics topped up the oil levels to what they thought was the correct height, they were in fact leaving the engines dangerously short of lubricant. The trucks began breaking down with alarming regularity, hampering the war effort of the invading army.
Boulanger did far more than just tamper with dipsticks. He also mastered a technique of 'destructive compliance', where he ruthlessly applied every regulation and policy handed down by the German occupiers. Nazi Germany was, by design, a viper's nest of parallel governing systems, power bases and bureaucracy and Boulanger learned to the full how to play the German occupying government of France, the Wehrmacht and the various ministries back in Berlin off against each other. He was fastidious about ensuring that if the rules required a document to be signed by some ministerial secretary in Berlin, that it would be signed by that ministerial secretary in Berlin - not stamped, and not signed by their representative in Paris, or by a clerk 'on behalf of'. So bits of paper would be flying back and forth between the Citroen factory and various German departments and no trucks were made.

He was also fond of organising big meetings between all the interested parties (German civil occupying government, Army, Luftwaffe, War Production Ministry etc.) with a cheery attitude of "just wanting to make sure everyone gets the trucks they need", when of course these meetings would quickly dissolve into in-fighting about who was getting too many trucks or why there wasn't enough raw material or further calls for investigations and audits and nothing would get done - which was Boulanger's aim.

When the Germans seized Citroen's factory tooling and were going to cart it back to Germany, Boulanger liased with the Resistance to let them know when the shipment was being made, and partisans swapped all the traffic labels on the railway wagons in the Paris marshalling yard, so the tooling ended up scattered all over Europe - anywhere but Germany. That was why Citroen's post-war range consisted of the Traction Avant (the tooling for which was left in Paris because they were built as staff cars for the Wehrmacht) and the flat-sided, corrugated 2CV and H-Van, because they could be built without tooling. Citroen had a team scouring Europe in the late 1940s for their machinery. Much of it was now behind the Iron Curtain, and a key part of getting the DS into production in 1955 was getting W. Germany to provide new tooling as reparations (which is also why the 2CV lost its corrugated body panels for the 1960s).





vaud

55,102 posts

170 months

Tuesday 3rd June
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A masterpiece of malicious compliance.

Skii

1,766 posts

206 months

Tuesday 3rd June
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Not sure if this one has come up before..

List of inventors killed by their own invention


98elise

29,735 posts

176 months

Tuesday 3rd June
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mikey_b said:
MissChief said:
Fer said:
I was reading this and thinking it must have been from even the 1800's, or maybe early 1900's. 1994!
And in a zoo!! With 'medical care provided by the zoo's vetinarians'! What on earth were they thinking?
It's mental isn't it. Like you I could see this happening 100 years ago, but not in my life time!

CT05 Nose Cone

25,510 posts

242 months

Tuesday 3rd June
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The 1916 Black Tom explosion, when Germany carried out a terrorist attack on New York which also damaged the Statue of Liberty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Tom_explosion

Yet somehow the US still remained neutral for nearly a whole year afterwards.