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

Manmohan Singh

Former prime minister of India Manmohan Singh (pictured) dies at the age of 92.
Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 crashes near Aktau International Airport, Kazakhstan, killing 38 people.
The Parker Solar Probe makes its closest approach to the Sun.
A multi-vehicle crash in Minas Gerais, Brazil, leaves 41 people dead.

Selected anniversaries

December 28

Depiction of Alaric II

484 – Alaric II (depicted) succeeded his father Euric as King of the Visigoths.
1916 – Up to 1,000 lumber workers initiated a labor strike against the Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company in Minnesota, United States, which lasted over a month.
1964 – Vietnam War: Viet Cong regiments penetrated the eastern perimeters of the village of Bình Giã, beginning the Battle of Binh Gia.
2009 – Tibetan dissident filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen was imprisoned for subversion by Chinese authorities after a secret trial.
2014 – The passenger ferry Norman Atlantic caught fire in the Adriatic Sea, killing an estimated 28 people.

Antoine Furetière (b. 1619)
Arthur Hunter Palmer (b. 1819)
Barbara Judge (b. 1946)
Susan Sontag (d. 2004)

More anniversaries:

Did you know...

Kwan Man-ching

... that Kwan Man-ching (pictured), who directed more than fifty films in forty years, entered the industry hoping to meet his celebrity crush?
... that the style of Hermann Weyl's Gruppentheorie und Quantenmechanik has been likened to "a smiling figure on horseback, cutting a clean way through ... with a swift bright sword"?
... that international adult figure skating champion Naz Arıcı learned to skate at the age of 29?
... that in 1967 two mathematicians published PhD dissertations independently disproving the same thirteen-year-old conjecture?
... that Shalom Nagar, executioner of war criminal and Nazi Party official Adolf Eichmann, said he was selected at random for the role?
... that Kevin Roose wrote a viral article about artificial intelligence rhetoric after an AI bot attempted to convince him to leave his wife?
... that Karl Thielscher began refereeing American football games less than a month after retiring from playing the sport professionally?
... that between February and August 1918 the Petergofsky District mobilized more than 20 combat units for the Red Army?
... that a South Korean actor sold his belongings and went $7 million into debt to keep his amusement park running?

Today's featured article

George E. Mylonas (1898–1988) was a Greek archaeologist of ancient Greece and of Aegean prehistory. He excavated widely, particularly at Olynthus, Eleusis and Mycenae, where he made the first archaeological study and publication of Grave Circle B, the earliest known monumentalized burials at the site. Mylonas was born in Smyrna, then part of the Ottoman Empire, and received an elite education. In 1924, he began working for the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He took part in excavations at Corinth, Nemea and Olynthus under its auspices. He studied and taught at universities in Greece and the United States. He was prominent in the Archaeological Society of Athens and in efforts to conserve the monuments of the Acropolis of Athens. He had co-responsibility for the excavation of Mycenae's Grave Circle B in the early 1950s, and from 1957 until 1985 he excavated on the citadel of the site. His excavations at Mycenae have been credited with bringing coherence to the site. (Full article...)

Recently featured:

Picture of the day

Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) was an English composer best known for his operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert. Among his early works were a ballet, a symphony, a cello concerto and a one-act comic opera, Cox and Box, which is still widely performed. He wrote his first opera with Gilbert, Thespis, in 1871. The impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte engaged Gilbert and Sullivan to create a one-act piece, Trial by Jury, in 1875. Its box-office success led the partners to collaborate on twelve full-length comic operas, known as the Savoy operas, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. Sullivan's only grand opera, Ivanhoe, though initially successful in 1891, has rarely been revived. His works include twenty-four operas, eleven major orchestral works, ten choral works and oratorios, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous church pieces, songs, and piano and chamber pieces. His hymns and songs include "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "The Lost Chord". This carte de visite of Sullivan was taken around 1870 by the English photographer H. J. Whitlock.Photograph credit: H. J. Whitlock; restored by Adam Cuerden

Archive – More featured pictures...