What's the most interesting thing you've learned from Wikipedia?
It's another day in our week long LinkedIn Answers Q&A event, which has already featured thus far, questions from Barack Obama, Robert Sutton, Kara Swisher on tech entrepreneurship. Today, we have Jimmy Wales, Owner of Wikia and Founder of Wikipedia, ask you what is the most interesting thing you've learned from Wikipedia (Answer here). And, as always, we have a wealth of answers to choose from; almost 400 answers, since the question was actually asked.
I thought I knew Wikipedia; not until I read through each answer and they're still pouring in. If you've a favorite Wikipedia find, answer Jimmy Wales' question here. Here are a few interesting answers:
Kurt Jarnagin | V.P. New Technology at Iconix Biosciences
I love the random article feature of Wikipedia, I visit 2-4 each day. One recent interesting article was a very detailed article about food and diet in Europe in the Middle Ages. I was quite interesting to think about what foods were available and what foods arrived after the discovery of the Americas and foods that were adopted later.
Christopher Edwards | Senior Designer, Sage Communications
Weird factoids about my hometown in western suburban Chicago. That Bob Woodward was born in my hometown in Illinois. And through a series of links beginning at Wikipedia -- that Allan Pinkterton was the first deputy of the police department.
Anders Anderson | Research engineer at Uppsala University
On November 16, 2006, the main page featured a photo of a distinguished man dressed in blue. I was amazed to learn that the colour photograph was taken in 1911, and I spent the next few days (or maybe even weeks) studying Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's pictures of pre-revolutionary Russia.
I had sort of assumed that the sky was blue and the grass was green also before WWII, rather than varying shades of gray as I'm used to see on old photos, but here I was looking at pretty stunning technical evidence of that fact (unlike paintings, which may simply reflect the painter's imagination). And that evidence had been preserved since even before WWI, when my grandmother (b. 1896) was still a teenager. She later became an amateur photographer, but all her photos from the 1920's and 1930's are in black and white.
It was almost like finding a time machine.
And, there are so many more answers to this question streaming in. Feel free to add your favorite Wikipedia find here.