User:Allard

Hello and a warm welcome to all my fellow Wikipedians. How nice of you to drop in to see who I am!

Morning>

Wikipedia & me:

How I discovered Wikipedia, I do not remember. But from being a reader I slowly became a contributor. Although I don't work that much on Wikipedia I do see myself as a Wikipedian. I don't go searching on Wikipedia what I can edit next, I edit what I find and want to do. This means I add and mainly improve a lot of small things and only rarely I make large edits.

My work:

My list of contributions

Articles I've started on Wikipedia:

Images I made for Wikipedia:

Article guide:

A list of articles worth looking at, if one can find them:

And there's always the Random article

And to all citizens of the European Union, please read this: Oneseat.eu

News

Brigitte Haas

The Patriotic Union, led by Brigitte Haas (pictured), wins the most seats in the Landtag of Liechtenstein.
In American football, the Philadelphia Eagles defeat the Kansas City Chiefs to win the Super Bowl.
Former president of Namibia Sam Nujoma dies at the age of 95.
A series of boycotts against retail stores expands to several countries in Southeast Europe.
The 49th imam of Nizari Isma'ilism, Aga Khan IV, dies at the age of 88 and is succeeded by his son Aga Khan V.

Selected anniversaries

February 14: Valentine's Day

Detail from Pale Blue Dot

1655 – Arauco War: The Mapuche carried out a series of coordinated attacks against Spanish settlements and forts in colonial Chile, beginning a ten-year period of warfare.
1779 – Native Hawaiians killed the English explorer Captain James Cook after he attempted to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, the ruling chief of the island of Hawaii.
1990 – The NASA space probe Voyager 1 took Pale Blue Dot (detail pictured), a photograph of Earth from a record distance of 40.5 astronomical units (6.06 billion km; 3.76 billion mi).
2005 – The online video platform YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim.
2007 – The first of several bombings in Zahedan, Iran, killed 18 members of the Revolutionary Guards.

Valentin Friedland (b. 1490)
Eleanora Atherton (b. 1782)
Nadezhda Krupskaya (b. 1869)
Vito Genovese (d. 1969)

More anniversaries:

Did you know...

Hans Dieter Beck

... that Hans Dieter Beck (pictured), a co-head of the publisher C. H. Beck, rode a bicycle to work until he was 92?
... that the 2023 Aston by-election was the first time in more than 100 years that the governing party won a seat from the opposition at an Australian by-election?
... that Walter III Brisebarre renounced the lordship of Beirut to inherit a greater lordship from his father-in-law, only to permanently lose both upon the deaths of his wife, Helena of Milly, and their daughter Beatrice?
... that Born in the U.S.A. was the first compact disc to be manufactured in the United States for commercial release?
... that Ívar Bárðarson's 14th-century reports of feral livestock inhabiting a failed Greenlandic colony were corroborated by the discovery of a frozen goat and animal feces inside an abandoned home?
... that Princess Mononoke was the most expensively animated, most expensively promoted, and highest-grossing Japanese film of its time?
... that Raging Bull was the first hypercoaster to feature a twister layout?
... that the Albis Tunnel was the second-longest railway tunnel in Switzerland when it was built?
... that Morph was included in X-Men: The Animated Series because the writers "really wanted to kill somebody"?

Today's featured article

Adele

"My Little Love" is a song by English singer Adele (pictured) from her fourth studio album, 30 (2021). Adele wrote the song with its producer, Greg Kurstin. The song became available as the album's third track on 19 November 2021, when it was released by Columbia Records. "My Little Love" is a jazz, R&B, and soul song with a 1970s-style groove, gospel-music influences, late-night bar piano, and a funk bassline. The song incorporates voice notes of Adele's conversations with her son as she explains the effects of her divorce on his life and pleads for his understanding and forgiveness. Critics generally praised "My Little Love", comparing it to the work of Marvin Gaye, among other artists. Reviews highlighted the emotionalism and vulnerability displayed in the song, but some found the inclusion of the voice notes excessive. The track reached the top 20 in Australia, Canada, Iceland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden, and entered the top 40 in several other countries. (This article is part of a featured topic: 30 (album).)

Recently featured:

Picture of the day

The pomegranate (Punica granatum) is a fruit-bearing deciduous shrub in the family Lythraceae that grows between 5 and 10 metres (16 and 33 feet) tall. The pomegranate fruit husk is red-purple in color, with an outer, hard pericarp, and an inner, spongy mesocarp (white "albedo"), which comprises the fruit inner wall where seeds attach. Pomegranate seeds are characterized by having sarcotesta, thick fleshy seed coats derived from the integuments or outer layers of the ovule's epidermal cells. The number of seeds in a fruit can vary from 200 to about 1,400. Rich in symbolic and mythological associations in many cultures, the pomegranate is thought to have originated from Afghanistan and Iran before being introduced and exported to other parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. This photograph, which was focus-stacked from 10 separate images, shows a whole pomegranate fruit (right), and a fruit split open to reveal the arils, each of which surrounds a seed (left).Photograph credit: Ivar Leidus

Archive – More featured pictures...