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

David Lynch in 1990

A ceasefire agreement is reached to suspend the Israel–Hamas war, involving the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.
American filmmaker David Lynch (pictured) dies at the age of 78.
South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol is arrested after his declaration of martial law.
In Chad, the ruling Patriotic Salvation Movement retains a majority in the National Assembly amidst a boycott by opposition parties.

Selected anniversaries

January 20: Day of Nationwide Sorrow in Azerbaijan (1990); Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States (2025)

Roller coasters

1265 – Simon de Montfort summoned local representatives to the Palace of Westminster to attend a parliament, now considered to be the forerunner of the House of Commons of England.
1840 – William II became King of the Netherlands after his father William I abdicated the throne.
1885 – LaMarcus Adna Thompson, sometimes called the "Father of Gravity", patented the roller coaster (pictured).
1945 – World War II: In an operation that took nearly two months to complete, Germany began the evacuation of at least 1.8 million people from East Prussia in anticipation of the advancing Soviet Red Army.
2018 – A group of Taliban gunmen attacked and took hostages at the Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul, Afghanistan, sparking a 12-hour battle that left at least 21 people dead.

Sebastian Münster (b. 1488)
Agnes Mary Clerke (d. 1907)
Yolanda González (b. 1961)
Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh (b. 1965)

More anniversaries:

Did you know...

Illustration of the Liceu bombing

... that six innocent people were executed for the Liceu bombing (pictured), despite Santiago Salvador confessing that he was the sole perpetrator?
... that Pixel Piracy's developers released a free torrent of their game?
... that Gracie Abrams wrote Good Riddance about her breakup from her former collaborator and boyfriend, Blake Slatkin?
... that Wu Zhong was recognized as the youngest general in the Chinese People's Liberation Army after the first holder was stripped of the title following his emigration to the Soviet Union?
... that the 1926 film Lonely Orchid was adapted from a British novel via a Chinese translation of a Japanese translation?
... that two different colleges experienced fires while Frederick W. Hinitt was their president?
... that South Korean sources reported in January 2024 that several thousand North Korean migrant workers occupied a factory and took hostages?
... that World War II nurse Ethel Lote practised yoga and tai chi until she was 95?
... that "Prius Missile" is internet slang for traffic accidents involving older drivers in Japan?

Today's featured article

Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) was the seventh president of the United States, serving from 1829 to 1837. He was a frontier lawyer and briefly served in the House of Representatives and the Senate, representing Tennessee. He became a wealthy planter who owned hundreds of African-American slaves during his lifetime. In 1801, he was appointed colonel of the Tennessee militia and was elected its commander. In the War of 1812 against the British, Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 made him a national hero. He later commanded U.S. forces in the First Seminole War, which led to the annexation of Florida from Spain. He was elected president in 1828, defeating John Quincy Adams in a landslide. In 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act. This act displaced tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands east of the Mississippi and resulted in thousands of deaths. Jackson's legacy remains controversial, and opinions on his legacy are frequently polarized. (Full article...)

Recently featured:

Picture of the day

Racial segregation in the United States included the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from White Americans, as well as the separation of other ethnic minorities from majority communities. Facilities and services such as housing, healthcare, education, employment and transportation in the United States have been systematically separated based on racial categorizations. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), so long as "separate but equal" facilities were provided, a requirement that was rarely met. The doctrine's applicability to public schools was unanimously overturned in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and several landmark cases including Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964) further ruled against racial segregation, helping to bring an end to the Jim Crow laws. During the civil rights movement, de jure segregation was formally outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, while de facto segregation continues today in areas including residential segregation and school segregation, as part of ongoing racism and discrimination in the United States. This photograph, taken in 1939 by Russell Lee, shows an African-American man drinking at a water dispenser, with a sign reading "Colored", in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City.Photograph credit: Russell Lee; restored by Adam Cuerden

Archive – More featured pictures...