Dancing mania is a phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, in which groups of people would dance through the streets of towns or cities, sometimes foaming at the mouth or speaking in tongues, until they collapsed from exhaustion.

Bumblebee myths

Thais use two systems for telling the time: the 24-hour clock and the traditional Thai six hour clock.

Hey, cool. I just found out that my city has a pretty active community wiki.

Sleepwalking murder

On September 17th, Jimmy Wales starts an article about a famous restaurant.

2 hours later, somebody tags the article -- not for deletion, but for speedy deletion, calling it spam.

The next revision removed the tag, and the current article looks good, but jesus. Speedy deletion is the quick guillotine intended for articles on which there can be no debate, articles that are unambiguously junk. If this is the type of treatment Jimmy Wales gets...

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Addendum: it's healthy for wales not to be treated like a monarch. But he does get cut more slack than regular users.
Addendum 2: It looks like the story's more complex. Geoffrey Burling has the details.

List of incidents famously considered great blunders

Wanted poster for john wilkes booth

A day in the life of an article. And the followup:

I waited a few days for the deletion storm to pass and attention to wander, then as quickly as I could I restored the history and trimmed out the advertising speak myself. The article has sat completely unmolested since then, apparently a perfectly fine article on a perfectly fine subject. It took me _four minutes_ to fix it up nicely according to the timestamps. There must be umpteen thousands of such articles sitting in the deleted versions bin, probably never to be rescued. It's very disheartening.

Oh noes!

The mainstream media has beaten me to the punch -- the WaPo mentioned WikiDashboard, "a quick way to find the most active editors of an article". I knew about it! I swear! I just didn't post about it in time!

Here's a fuller explanation.

The Washington Post on Wikipedia's interplay with the 2008 presidential campaign. They've got the wikipedia culture down pretty well, too.

What with the Ignore all Rules explanation and the Editors matter essay, it looks like there's momentum in the right direction.

Globus Cassus is a utopian project for the transformation of Planet Earth into a much bigger, hollow, artificial world with an ecosphere on its inner surface.

The first programmable robot and drum machine, circa 1206 a.d.

Via Timeline of the most important human inventions. (Spoiler: everything before the 16th century was invented in china or n. africa.)

War Plan Red was a military document outlining a hypothetical war between the United States and the British Empire (the "Red" forces). It was developed by the United States Army during the mid 1920s, and was officially withdrawn in 1939, when it and others like it were replaced by the five "Rainbow" plans created to deal with the Axis threat.

The war was intended to be a continental war, waged primarily on North American territory between the United States and the British Empire. The assumption was that Canada would represent the ideal geographic forum through which the British could wage war against the United States.

Defence Scheme No. 1 was a plan created by Canadian Director of Military Operations and Intelligence Col. James "Buster" Sutherland Brown, for a Canadian counter-invasion of the United States.

Spider webs in space

The glass harmonica is a type of musical instrument that uses a series of glass bowls or goblets graduated in size to produce musical tones by means of friction, making it a crystallophone. Note that despite being played with wet fingers, the sound is produced by the glass, so the glass harmonica is not a hydraulophone even if played completely submerged in water.

David Phillips (pudding)

2 millionth wikipedia article

Apparently, it's El Hormiguero

The mailing list says:

Apparently, the 2,000,000th article in en-wp is El Hormiguero, on a Spanish comedy and science TV show. (This is not yet officially confirmed by WMF, and seems to be under a bit of bickering.)

We should get them to do a skit about Wikipedia for one of their shows, and then release it under a free license permitting reuse and derivative works... then we can set up a kiosk with a television monitor playing that show in a continuous loop (with English subtitles) along with other Wikipedia/Wikimedia stuff (like a speech by Jimbo), and put it in the Jordanhill railway station, thus combining the 1,000,000th and 2,000,000th topics in a place that Wikipedians can make pilgrimages to.

A premature obituary occurs when someone's death is reported while they are still alive. List of premature obituaries.