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Because of the extent of human influence, the boundaries between what humans regard as nature and "made environments" is not clear cut except at the extremes. | English |
Even at the extremes, the amount of natural environment that is free of discernible human influence is diminishing at an increasingly rapid pace. | English |
The development of technology by the human race has allowed the greater exploitation of natural resources and has helped to alleviate some of the risk from natural hazards. | English |
In spite of this progress, however, the fate of human civilization remains closely linked to changes in the environment. | English |
There exists a highly complex feedback loop between the use of advanced technology and changes to the environment that are only slowly becoming understood. | English |
[73] Man-made threats to the Earth's natural environment include pollution, deforestation, and disasters such as oil spills. | English |
Humans have contributed to the extinction of many plants and animals. | English |
Humans employ nature for both leisure and economic activities. | English |
The acquisition of natural resources for industrial use remains a sizable component of the world's economic system. | English |
[74][75] Some activities, such as hunting and fishing, are used for both sustenance and leisure, often by different people. | English |
Agriculture was first adopted around the 9th millennium BCE. | English |
Ranging from food production to energy, nature influences economic wealth. | English |
Although early humans gathered uncultivated plant materials for food and employed the medicinal properties of vegetation for healing,[76] most modern human use of plants is through agriculture. | English |
The clearance of large tracts of land for crop growth has led to a significant reduction in the amount available of forestation and wetlands, resulting in the loss of habitat for many plant and animal species as well as increased erosion. | English |
[77] Beauty in nature has historically been a prevalent theme in art and books, filling large sections of libraries and bookstores. | English |
That nature has been depicted and celebrated by so much art, photography, poetry, and other literature shows the strength with which many people associate nature and beauty. | English |
Reasons why this association exists, and what the association consists of, are studied by the branch of philosophy called aesthetics. | English |
Beyond certain basic characteristics that many philosophers agree about to explain what is seen as beautiful, the opinions are virtually endless. | English |
[78] Nature and wildness have been important subjects in various eras of world history. | English |
An early tradition of landscape art began in China during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). | English |
The tradition of representing nature as it is became one of the aims of Chinese painting and was a significant influence in Asian art. | English |
Although natural wonders are celebrated in the Psalms and the Book of Job, wilderness portrayals in art became more prevalent in the 1800s, especially in the works of the Romantic movement. | English |
British artists John Constable and J. M. W. Turner turned their attention to capturing the beauty of the natural world in their paintings. | English |
Before that, paintings had been primarily of religious scenes or of human beings. | English |
William Wordsworth's poetry described the wonder of the natural world, which had formerly been viewed as a threatening place. | English |
Increasingly the valuing of nature became an aspect of Western culture. | English |
[79] This artistic movement also coincided with the Transcendentalist movement in the Western world. | English |
A common classical idea of beautiful art involves the word mimesis, the imitation of nature. | English |
Also in the realm of ideas about beauty in nature is that the perfect is implied through perfect mathematical forms and more generally by patterns in nature. | English |
As David Rothenburg writes, "The beautiful is the root of science and the goal of art, the highest possibility that humanity can ever hope to see". | English |
[80]:281 Some fields of science see nature as matter in motion, obeying certain laws of nature which science seeks to understand. | English |
For this reason the most fundamental science is generally understood to be "physics"—the name for which is still recognizable as meaning that it is the "study of nature". | English |
Matter is commonly defined as the substance of which physical objects are composed. | English |
It constitutes the observable universe. | English |
The visible components of the universe are now believed to compose only 4.9 percent of the total mass. | English |
The remainder is believed to consist of 26.8 percent cold dark matter and 68.3 percent dark energy. | English |
[81] The exact arrangement of these components is still unknown and is under intensive investigation by physicists. | English |
The behaviour of matter and energy throughout the observable universe appears to follow well-defined physical laws. | English |
These laws have been employed to produce cosmological models that successfully explain the structure and the evolution of the universe we can observe. | English |
The mathematical expressions of the laws of physics employ a set of twenty physical constants[82] that appear to be static across the observable universe. | English |
[83] The values of these constants have been carefully measured, but the reason for their specific values remains a mystery. | English |
Outer space, also simply called space, refers to the relatively empty regions of the Universe outside the atmospheres of celestial bodies. | English |
Outer space is used to distinguish it from airspace (and terrestrial locations). | English |
There is no discrete boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space, as the atmosphere gradually attenuates with increasing altitude. | English |
Outer space within the Solar System is called interplanetary space, which passes over into interstellar space at what is known as the heliopause. | English |
Outer space is sparsely filled with several dozen types of organic molecules discovered to date by microwave spectroscopy, blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang and the origin of the universe, and cosmic rays, which include ionized atomic nuclei and various subatomic particles. | English |
There is also some gas, plasma and dust, and small meteors. | English |
Additionally, there are signs of human life in outer space today, such as material left over from previous manned and unmanned launches which are a potential hazard to spacecraft. | English |
Some of this debris re-enters the atmosphere periodically. | English |
Although Earth is the only body within the solar system known to support life, evidence suggests that in the distant past the planet Mars possessed bodies of liquid water on the surface. | English |
[84] For a brief period in Mars' history, it may have also been capable of forming life. | English |
At present though, most of the water remaining on Mars is frozen. | English |
If life exists at all on Mars, it is most likely to be located underground where liquid water can still exist. | English |
[85] Conditions on the other terrestrial planets, Mercury and Venus, appear to be too harsh to support life as we know it. | English |
But it has been conjectured that Europa, the fourth-largest moon of Jupiter, may possess a sub-surface ocean of liquid water and could potentially host life. | English |
[86] Astronomers have started to discover extrasolar Earth analogs – planets that lie in the habitable zone of space surrounding a star, and therefore could possibly host life as we know it. | English |
[87] Media: Organizations: Philosophy: Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (listen) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪki-/ (listen) wik-ee-) is a multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopedia created and maintained by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system. | English |
It is one of the 15 most popular websites as ranked by Alexa, as of January 2021[update][3] and The Economist newspaper placed it as the "13th-most-visited place on the web". | English |
[4] Featuring no advertisements, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded primarily through donations. | English |
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. | English |
Sanger coined its name[5][6] as a portmanteau of "wiki" and "encyclopedia". | English |
It was initially an English-language encyclopedia, but versions in other languages were quickly developed. | English |
With 6.2 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the 317 Wikipedia encyclopedias. | English |
Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 55 million articles,[7] attracting 1.7 billion unique visitors per month. | English |
[8][9] Wikipedia has been criticized for its uneven accuracy and for exhibiting systemic bias, including gender bias, with the majority of editors being male. | English |
[4] Edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women's topics. | English |
[10] In 2006, Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales. | English |
[11] The project's reputation improved further in the 2010s as it increased efforts to improve its quality and reliability, based on its unique structure, curation and absence of commercial bias. | English |
[4] In 2018, Facebook and YouTube announced that they would help users detect fake news by suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles. | English |
[12] Other collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia, but none were as successful. | English |
[13] Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. | English |
[14] It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. | English |
Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. | English |
[15][16] Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but even before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. | English |
[17] Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[18][19] while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. | English |
[20] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. | English |
[21] The domains wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org were registered on January 12, 2001,[22] and January 13, 2001,[23] respectively, and Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001,[14] as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[24] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. | English |
[18] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[25] was codified in its first few months. | English |
Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia. | English |
[18] Originally, Bomis intended to make Wikipedia a business for profit. | English |
[26] Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. | English |
Language editions were also created, with a total of 161 by the end of 2004. | English |
[27] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. | English |
The English Wikipedia passed the mark of two million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made during the Ming Dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years. | English |
[28] Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. | English |
[29] Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org. | English |
[30][31] Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of new articles and of contributors, appears to have peaked around early 2007. | English |
[32] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800. | English |
[33] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change. | English |
[34] Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging fruit"—topics that clearly merit an article—have already been created and built up extensively. | English |
[35][36][37] In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. | English |
[38][39] The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. | English |
[40] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the methodology of the study. | English |
[41] Two years later, in 2011, Wales acknowledged the presence of a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. | English |
In the same interview, Wales also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable". | English |
[42] A 2013 article titled "The Decline of Wikipedia" in MIT Technology Review questioned this claim. | English |
The article revealed that since 2007, Wikipedia had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and those still there have focused increasingly on minutiae. | English |
[43] In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators is also in decline. | English |
[44] In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis". | English |
[45] In January 2007, Wikipedia entered for the first time the top-ten list of the most popular websites in the US, according to comscore Networks. | English |