Word: englishes
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Like it or loathe it, Wikipedia is a force. When contributors penned its new entry on Norwegian actress Beate Eriksen on Aug. 17, the English-language version of the controversial user-generated encyclopedia reached 3 million entries. More impressive still: more than 10 million users contributed to that milestone. Not bad for a service originally conceived as an afterthought to Nupedia, a failed first attempt by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Lawrence Sanger at creating a free online encyclopedia...
...impressive a milestone as 3 million articles is, it simply makes the English Wikipedia the largest component of a massive international enterprise. Wikipedia now contains more than 13 million articles in 271 different languages. The German-language version is the next largest, with more than 900,000 entries, but there's something for readers of every language. Even Cheyenne, which is spoken by only 1,700 Native Americans, has its own version of Wikipedia, although it boasts just 62 articles. Wales, who remains the "spiritual head" of the movement, says he wants Wikipedia to one day contain...
...ancient Soviet Koryo Airways Ilyushin, departing from Beijing, I was handed the English-language Pyongyang Times. That day's front page showed a photo of a smiling Kim Jong Il under the headline "DPRK Shines Under the Leadership of Brilliant Commander." The "glorious" and "superb" Dear Leader was mentioned in nearly every article inside, giving "on-the-spot guidance" to industrial workers, farms or his generals...
Devi, known to her friends as Ayesha, was born into the royal family of tiny Cooch Behar in eastern India. In her autobiography, she recalled an idyllic childhood of English governesses, big-game hunting and finishing school in Switzerland. Her mother, a daring socialite in her own right, disapproved of Devi's joining the orthodox royal house of Jaipur, whose women lived in purdah--hidden from the gaze of men outside their families. But Devi had already fallen in love with the jet-setting, polo-playing maharaja, and she soon made Jaipur her own. She started an élite girls...
...clunker. The used-car farce The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard fell hard, cadging just $5.5 million and instantly qualifying for an federal auto bailout. Of the other new releases, Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo, which had made $165 million in its native Japan, earned $3.5 million in the English-language version - which is not much, but is also not bad, considering the modest returns for Miyazaki's previous theatrical releases in North America (Princess Mononoke, $2.4 million; Spirited Away, $10 million; and Howl's Moving Castle, $4.7 million). The high-school rock musical Bandslam made little noise, landing in 13th...