Best of en.wikipedia.org on Kiwi News
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33 stories from en.wikipedia.org have been shared on Kiwi News since 20 April 2023, with 52 upvotes and 13 comments in total. The latest was shared on 1 March 2026. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Join, or Die
Benjamin Franklin's 1754 woodcut "Join, or Die," first published in The Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754, shows a snake cut into eight segments labeled with colony initials to argue for colonial unity during the French and Indian War. The cartoon accompanied Franklin's editorial on the "disunited state" of the colonies and supported his proposed Albany Plan. During the Stamp Act Congress of 1765–1766, American colonists reused the image to urge resistance to British laws, and Paul Revere altered it for the masthead of the Massachusetts Spy on July 7, 1774. The article notes that the image has been widely redrawn since, including by Craig Ferguson's 2009 tattoo and a planned 46-foot statue in Philadelphia.
- Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing
Wikipedia's "Signs of AI writing" page is a field guide listing writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, drawn from real Wikipedia content, to help editors detect undisclosed AI-generated text. It states that these signs are only observations and potential indicators, not proof, since humans and detection tools both make errors and some human writing shares these traits. The page highlights two recurring patterns: undue emphasis on significance, legacy and broader trends, with stock phrases such as "marking a pivotal moment" and "a testament to," and canned emphasis on notability, attribution and media coverage, such as listing trade publications or stating that a subject "maintains an active social media presence."
- Suchir Balaji - Wikipedia
Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI researcher who had accused the company of violating U.S. copyright law, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, 2024. The San Francisco Police Department and the Chief Medical Examiner concluded the death was a suicide, and an autopsy report released February 14, 2025 described a single self-inflicted gunshot wound. Balaji's parents disputed that finding, saying a second autopsy they commissioned showed evidence of homicide, though they did not provide a copy of it.
- Room 641A - Wikipedia
Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility at an AT&T site in San Francisco, operated for the U.S. National Security Agency as part of a mass surveillance program that began in 2003 and was revealed by AT&T technician Mark Klein in 2006. The room contains a Narus STA 6400 device and is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters on Internet backbone trunks. According to J. Scott Marcus, a former GTE CTO and FCC adviser, it has access to all Internet traffic passing through the building. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit was dismissed in 2011 after Congress granted retroactive immunity, and a 2019 ruling in Jewel v. NSA found Klein could not establish the room's content, function, or purpose from his own knowledge.
- Turkey illusion
The Turkey illusion is a cognitive bias in which surprise follows a break in a trend whose causes or framework conditions are unknown. Bertrand Russell introduced the concept to illustrate a problem with inductive reasoning, and the article describes a variation in which a Thanksgiving turkey grows more confident each day it is fed, until it is slaughtered by the person who cared for it. The article says the turkey cannot recognize the trend break because it lacks the information about the feeder's motivations needed to do so.
- Brandolini's law
Brandolini's law, also called the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in January 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini, holding that refuting bullshit takes an order of magnitude more energy than producing it. The article gives examples, including the claim that vaccines cause autism, which persisted despite Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper being retracted and his medical license revoked. It also cites a 2016 claim that Iceland's football team victory over England caused a baby boom, which statistical analysis later disproved. In a COVID-19 example, Radio-Canada journalist Jeff Yates said a pineapple importer's video took 15 minutes to make, while his fact-check took three days.
- Mrs. Watanabe
Mrs. Watanabe, also called Kimono Trader, is a term that became prominent in the early 2000s for a stereotype of Japanese retail foreign exchange (FX) traders. A 1997 reference in The Economist became well known, although the term was used as early as the 1980s. Despite the "Mrs." honorific, about 85% of Japan's retail currency traders as of 2019 were male, mostly in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Gearoid Reidy of Bloomberg News concluded that the term's meaning shifted from a Japanese equivalent of Joe Sixpack to specifically referring to FX traders.
- Nosedive (Black Mirror) - Wikipedia
"Nosedive" is the first episode of the third series of Black Mirror, written by Michael Schur and Rashida Jones from a story by Charlie Brooker, directed by Joe Wright, and released on Netflix on 21 October 2016. It depicts a society where people rate each other from one to five stars for every interaction, affecting their socioeconomic status. The episode follows Lacie Pound (Bryce Dallas Howard), who seeks a higher rating to secure a luxury apartment and is ultimately jailed after a disastrous speech at her childhood friend Naomi's wedding. The episode received mainly positive reviews, with its pastel visuals and Howard's performance widely praised, while a common criticism was its predictability.
- El Farol Bar problem
The El Farol Bar problem is a game theory problem in which a fixed population decides each Thursday whether to go to a bar that is fun only when less than 60% of the population attends. Everyone must decide at once without knowing others' choices, and the article says a deterministic symmetric strategy is guaranteed to fail, since a predicted empty bar fills up and a predicted crowded bar empties. It says a probabilistic mixed strategy does better and that the single-stage problem has a unique symmetric Nash equilibrium mixed strategy. The problem is named after a bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and was created in 1994 by W. Brian Arthur, though B. A. Huberman and T. Hogg formulated and solved it under another name six years earlier.
- „From the river to the sea“ slogan is being criminalized in the EU
"From the river to the sea" is a political slogan for the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, calling for a single state there. According to historian Robin D. G. Kelley, the Palestine Liberation Organization used it in the 1960s, and by 1969 it meant one democratic secular state replacing Israel. Many pro-Palestinian activists see it as a call for peace and equality, while many pro-Israel groups read it as a call for Israel's dissolution and describe it as antisemitic. Hamas used the phrase in its 2017 charter, some countries have considered criminalizing its use, and courts have found it can be protected expression depending on context.
- Pasteur's quadrant
Pasteur's quadrant is a classification of scientific research that seeks fundamental understanding of a problem while also having immediate use for society, a category that bridges basic and applied research. The term was introduced by Donald E. Stokes in his book Pasteur's Quadrant, and Louis Pasteur's research is thought to exemplify this approach. The classification sits alongside pure basic research, exemplified by Niels Bohr, and pure applied research, exemplified by Thomas Edison. The article notes that few individuals fall within the Pasteur cell, so modern science often uses a systems approach in which numerous researchers work together.
- How to get bias into a Wikipedia article
This essay, written as a guide to introducing bias into Wikipedia, describes tactics its author says he observed in Middle East articles, such as creating many overlapping articles to capture search traffic and labelling critics as "left wing" while leaving their accusers' politics unidentified. The author gives examples involving Gideon Levy, whose positions he says are kept vague, and Jaakobou, whom he quotes as urging that Levy's controversy be downplayed. The piece also cites Jaakobou's dispute with Peace Now over a government report citation, which the author presents as an example of attacks on source reliability.
- Jevons paradox
The Jevons paradox is the economic phenomenon in which technological improvements that raise the efficiency of a resource's use lead to higher, rather than lower, total consumption of that resource. William Stanley Jevons described it in his 1865 book The Coal Question, observing that England's coal consumption soared after James Watt's improvements to the steam engine made coal a more cost-effective power source. Later economists Daniel Khazzoom and Leonard Brookes revisited the idea for energy use, and Harry Saunders called the hypothesis that efficiency raises energy consumption the Khazzoom–Brookes postulate. The article notes considerable debate over its size and relevance, and that some environmental economists propose pairing efficiency gains with policies that keep the cost of use the same or higher.
- Monroe Doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine is a United States foreign policy position opposing foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere, which James Monroe first articulated on December 2, 1823, in his seventh annual State of the Union Address. The doctrine held that European efforts to control or influence sovereign states in the Americas would be viewed as a threat to U.S. security, while the U.S. would not interfere with existing European colonies. Because the U.S. lacked a credible navy and army at the time, it was largely ignored internationally, and Britain enforced it tactically through the Royal Navy. The doctrine was reinterpreted after 1898 as promoting multilateralism and non-intervention, and in 1933 the United States affirmed this view in co-founding the Organization of American States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
- Dialog (organization) - Wikipedia
Dialog is a private, invitation-only organization founded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman, and a June 2026 leak exposed details of its members and planned events. Wired reported that the leak included a list of 222 people registered for the 2026 retreat in Dublin, 87 of them first-time attendees. According to leaked information, Dialog staff and AI tools create dossiers on members and grade them, and lower-graded people usually pay full price, which can exceed $10,000. Dialog said the data access was an "attack" by a well-known criminal, while Wired said it found no evidence a break-in was needed.
- Executive Order 6102
Executive Order 6102, signed April 5, 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, forbade the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates within the continental United States. It required people to deliver excess holdings to the Federal Reserve by May 1, 1933 in exchange for $20.67 per troy ounce, while allowing up to $100 in gold coin and gold certificates per person. Violations were punishable by a fine of up to $10,000, up to ten years in prison, or both. The order was repealed effective December 31, 1974, under the International Development Association Appropriations Act of 1975.
- ZunZuneo: social app built to encourage Cubans to revolt against the government
ZunZuneo was a social networking and microblogging service that USAID covertly created and marketed to Cuban users to encourage young Cubans to revolt against their government. The service began operating in 2010, reached about 60,000 subscribers, and ran out of money in 2012. According to an Associated Press report, contractors funded by USAID used front companies and a Cayman Islands bank account to conceal the government's ties to the project. The network was reportedly designed to collect data on subscribers' "political tendencies" and to introduce political messages after building an audience with sports and music content.
- Diderot effect
The Diderot effect is a phenomenon in which acquiring a new possession sparks a spiral of consumption that leads to still more purchases, often causing overspending and accumulation beyond what one needs. The term was coined by anthropologist Grant McCracken in 1986 and is named after the French philosopher Denis Diderot, who described it in his 1769 essay "Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown." In that essay, Diderot describes how a gift of a scarlet dressing gown led him to replace his other possessions, eventually plunging him into debt.
- List of predictions for autonomous Tesla vehicles by Elon Musk - Wikipedia
Elon Musk's predictions for fully autonomous Tesla vehicles have repeatedly missed their stated deadlines, according to a Wikipedia list tracking them from 2013 onward. Most entries are marked as unmet, including his 2016 claim that complete autonomy was less than two years away and his 2018 suggestion that a coast-to-coast drive could take three to six months. Tesla says full autonomy depends on reliability far beyond human drivers and on regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. A 2023 investor lawsuit alleging securities fraud over these timelines was dismissed in September 2024 after Tesla's lawyers argued the statements were "corporate puffery."
- AT Protocol
The AT Protocol is an open set of standards for decentralized publishing and distribution of self-authenticating data on the social web, and it underpins the Bluesky social network. It uses a dual identifier system of mutable domain-name handles and immutable decentralized identifiers, with user data stored in individual repositories hosted on Personal Data Servers. Relays aggregate repository updates into a network-wide stream called the firehose, which the article describes as the protocol's most centralized component, and some of its specifications are being standardized through the IETF.
- Slow television
Slow television is a genre of marathon coverage that broadcasts an ordinary event in its full length, popularised by Norway's public broadcaster NRK beginning with a seven-hour train journey on 27 November 2009. NRK followed with live coverage of the Hurtigruten ship MS Nordnorge on a 134-hour voyage from Bergen to Kirkenes starting 16 June 2011, which the article says set a Guinness record as the world's longest live television documentary. The article also lists many later NRK programmes, including National Wood Night in 2013, which drew nearly a million viewers, and Hymnal – cover to cover in 2014, which drew 2.2 million viewers at some point.
- Conway's law
Conway's law holds that organizations which design systems produce designs that copy their communication structures, a idea Melvin Conway introduced in 1967. The law is based on the reasoning that components must be compatible, so the technical structure of a system reflects the social boundaries across which communication is harder. Evidence cited includes a study by MIT and Harvard Business School researchers, who found "strong evidence to support the mirroring hypothesis" and that the product from the loosely-coupled organization was significantly more modular than that from the tightly-coupled one. The article notes that opinions on whether this mirroring is desirable vary.
- Pluralistic ignorance
Pluralistic ignorance is a social psychology phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe that others mostly hold a different opinion than their own, so they go along with views they do not hold. Floyd Allport and Daniel Katz used the term for the first time in a 1931 book, and Prentice and Miller's study of campus drinking found that students believed peers were far more comfortable with drinking than they themselves were. A 2022 Nature Communications survey of 6,119 Americans found that 66-80% supported major climate-mitigation policies, while respondents estimated only 37-43% support on average.
- Retroactive continuity
Retroactive continuity, or retcon, is a literary device in which established facts in a previously published work are changed by new information in a later work, altering how earlier events are interpreted. The article lists motivations including accommodating sequels, responding to negative fan reception, and correcting errors. Examples include Arthur Conan Doyle bringing back Sherlock Holmes in "The Empty House" in 1903 after killing him off in "The Final Problem" in 1893, and the TV series Dallas annulling its ninth season as the dream of Pam Ewing so that Bobby Ewing could return. The first known use of the term in fiction appeared in DC Comics' All-Star Squadron #18 in February 1983.
- Canvas Fingerprinting
Canvas fingerprinting is a browser tracking technique that identifies visitors through the HTML5 canvas element rather than cookies, and it drew wide media coverage in 2014 after researchers from Princeton University and KU Leuven described it in a paper. The fingerprint varies mainly with the installed graphics processing unit or driver, and it can be shared with advertising partners. In a small study of 294 Amazon Mechanical Turk participants, researchers observed 5.7 bits of entropy, which alone is not enough to identify individuals. The 2022 DrawnApart technique extended the method to graphics hardware performance and was shown to boost tracking duration by 67% when combined with other methods.
- Ulysses pact
A Ulysses pact is a freely made decision designed to bind oneself in the future, and the article describes it as a concept used in medicine, technology and public policy. In medicine it is most often discussed regarding advance directives, where controversy exists over whether a decision made in one state of health should bind a person in a markedly worse state. The article notes that in the technology context, Apple's decision to engineer the iPhone so it could not read its own data during the FBI–Apple encryption dispute has been described as "a digital Ulysses pact," and Cory Doctorow calls binary transparency a "much stronger, more effective Ulysses pact."
- 1% rule - Wikipedia
The 1% rule is a rule of thumb holding that only about 1% of users of an Internet community actively create new content, while the other 99% only lurk. The term was coined by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, and the article notes that the 90–9–1 variant describes wikis, where 90% of participants only consume content, 9% edit it, and 1% add content. A 2014 paper on four digital health social networks, by van Mierlo, concluded that the rule was consistent across the four support groups, with a handful of "Superusers" generating most content. The article adds that the actual percentages likely vary by subject.
- Ringelmann effect
The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become less productive as the group grows, a pattern first reported by French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann in 1913. Ringelmann found that people pulling a rope together exerted significantly less effort than when they pulled alone. The article attributes the drop to two processes: motivation loss, also called social loafing, and coordination problems. It also cites Ingham et al. (1974), whose pseudo-group studies suggested motivational losses largely drive the decline, and it describes weaver ants that show the opposite pattern, or "superefficiency."
- Pizza Meter article on Wikipedia got deleted
The English Wikipedia article "The Pizza Meter" was deleted after a 2024 deletion debate, with the closing administrator Sandstein stating that the delete opinions were more numerous and convincing because the keep side did not cite substantial coverage in reliable sources. The nomination, by Reywas92, argued that the concept rested on a single Domino's store owner's unverified observations from 1991 about increased late-night deliveries to the White House, CIA and Pentagon during the Gulf War. Supporters of keeping the article pointed to a Washington Post article and a YouTube video, but delete voters said these offered little beyond brief mentions, and some suggested a redirect to Domino's Pizza or a single sentence elsewhere.
- Dollar auction
The dollar auction is a non-zero sum sequential game that economist Martin Shubik explored to show how short-sighted rational choices can lead to outcomes that are irrational in the long run. In the game, an auctioneer sells a dollar bill, but the second-highest bidder also pays their bid and loses it. Each short-term bid to limit losses pushes the price upward, so bids can reach and surpass one dollar, and according to the article, only the auctioneer profits in the end. The article also notes that the game is a discrete version of the war of attrition and that Augenblick's 2016 study examined the sunk-cost fallacy in penny auctions.
- Kerckhoffs's principle
Kerckhoffs's principle holds that a cryptosystem should remain secure even if everything about it except the key is public knowledge, a view widely embraced by cryptographers. Dutch cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs stated it in the 19th century, in an 1883 article, "La cryptographie militaire," published in two parts in the Journal of Military Science. Claude Shannon later phrased it as "the enemy knows the system," a form known as Shannon's maxim. The article adds that every secret creates a potential failure point, as Bruce Schneier puts it, and that secrets should be those least costly to change if disclosed.
- Corsi–Rosenthal Box
The Corsi–Rosenthal Box is a do-it-yourself air purifier built from four or five HVAC particulate filters forming a cube, with a box fan drawing air through them. A 2022 UC Davis study found the five-filter design's clean air delivery rate was between 600 and 850 cubic feet per minute, depending on fan speed, at roughly one-tenth the cost of commercial air purifiers. Engineers Richard Corsi and Jim Rosenthal created the design during the COVID-19 pandemic to reduce airborne viral particles indoors. The units can be assembled in about 15 minutes and cost between US$50 and $150 in materials.
- Smuggling of silkworm eggs into the Byzantine Empire
Two monks, with the support of Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I, smuggled living silkworms into the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire in the mid-6th century CE, establishing an indigenous silk industry. The monks had observed silk production in China by 551 CE, and in 552 CE they sought out Justinian I, agreeing to acquire silkworms in return for his promises. Because adult silkworms are fragile, they smuggled out eggs or very young larvae hidden in bamboo canes, and the expedition is estimated to have lasted two years. Silk factories then appeared in Constantinople, Beirut, Antioch, Tyre and Thebes, giving the empire a European silk monopoly.