Datasets:

BRODILOFT
/

wikifacts_crawled

text stringlengths 25 299
Sow thistles are named because they were fed to lactating sows.
Mary Hallaren was the first woman to join the United States Army.
In Lebanon, the spice mixture Za'atar is thought to bring physical strength and keep the mind alert.
Dutch magician Fred Kaps was the only magician to win the magic world championship three times.
While mine owner Franklin B. Gowen was the president of the Reading Railroad, he was also the special prosecutor in the trial to break up the clandestine Molly Maguires society.
Barbarossa is an award-winning German-style board game by Klaus Teuber from 1988 in which the players have to sculpt plasticine to earn points.
The children's anime series The Littl' Bits has aired in Japanese, English, Spanish, Polish, German, and Italian.
Nils Liedholm is the last surviving member of the famous footballing Gre-No-Li trio.
The Nasrani Menorah is the symbol of the Knanaya community in South India, acknowledged as Christian Jews by the Vatican.
NASA inventor and scientist, Dr. Pedro Rodriguez is the son of the renowned Puerto Rican salsa singer, the late Pellin Rodriguez.
Italian mathematician Guido Castelnuovo secretly taught geometry to Jewish students during World War II.
The UN estimates that 150,000 people died during the Liberian Civil War, with 850,000 refugees fleeing to neighboring countries.
From 1908 to 1940, over 100,000 of the 447 different models for Sears Catalog Homes were sold in the United States.
A Punnett square is a tool in genetics developed by British geneticist Reginald Punnett, and which biologists use to this day to predict the probability of possible genotypes of offspring.
The Ochil Hills are a Devonian lava extrusion whose southern fault line is particularly prominent today as an escarpment.
The Meadow Vole is a common rodent species found from Alaska to Florida, and that the subspecies from Florida is endangered.
Robert Koldewey led an archeological dig in modern day Iraq which he believed to be the location of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon for 18 years.
Melissa McIntyre, best known for her role in Degrassi: The Next Generation made her television debut in the 1997 series, Timesweep, in which she played an extraterrestial being.
Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev worked on mechanical linkage design for over thirty years which led to his work on Chebyshev polynomials.
Leo Tolstoy's play The Living Corpse played in New York City in both Yiddish (1911) and German (1916) before it was ever presented there in English (1918).
Weatherman Alex Deakin has a masters degree in astrophysics.
The Russian avant-garde art collective UNOVIS signed most of their works with a single black square, partly as a homage to a similar work by their leader, Kazimir Malevich.
San Francisco's annual Bay to Breakers footrace holds the world records for largest footrace and longest consecutively running footrace, and is famous for its party atmosphere including Elvis runners, nude runners, and free libations.
School bus yellow is a specific shade of yellow formally adopted as the standard color for school buses in the United States in 1939, following a conference funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
An amateur baseball tournament held on August 16, 1933 in the Christie Pits, ended with Nazi-symphatisers unveiling a flag depicting a swastika.
During the "dawn-to-dusk" publicity run for the CB&Q's Pioneer Zephyr on May 26 1934, the train reached a top speed of 112.5 mph (181 km/h).
The Yiddish King Lear by Jacob Gordin is not a translation of Shakespeare's King Lear, but that the title is an acknowledgement of the roots of the plot.
Ulysses S. Grant awarded Bolama to Portugal, who made it the first capital of Portuguese Guinea.
When he was promoted to president of the Great Northern Railway in 1919, Ralph Budd was the youngest American railroad president up to that date.
Boxcar is an Australian electronic band that sometimes performed wearing gas masks.
The Slovak National Theatre hosted its first performance, the Czech opera Hubička by Bedřich Smetana, at its opening on March 1, 1920.
In the history of neurology, Ancient Egyptians described the effect of high transection of the spinal cord in humans.
Empty nest syndrome is a form of depression that affects parents when a child leaves home.
Sue Rubin, the subject of the documentary film Autism Is a World, was considered mentally challenged until she learned to communicate with a keyboard.
Slovakia Summit 2005 between Presidents Bush and Putin will mark the first occasion when a sitting President of the United States visits Slovakia.
Representative Edith Nourse Rogers sponsored the G.I. Bill and the legislation that created the Women's Army Corps before becoming the longest-serving woman in the U.S. Congress.
The Patty Duke Show challenged the scope of special effects on television in the 1960s, with Patty Duke playing two roles.
John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset was one of the most noted cricketers of the mid-to-late 18th century.
Elmer Robinson was the 33rd mayor of San Francisco.
Ferdinandea was a volcanic island near Sicily which was claimed by four countries when it appeared in 1831, but was destroyed by erosion less than a year later.
Andy the Clown performed at Chicago White Sox games for 30 years, outlasting an attempt to replace him with two new mascots.
Arthur Ronald Nall Nall-Cain, 2nd Baron Brocket - grandfather of British TV celebrity Lord Brocket - was a known Nazi sympathiser.
Devils & Dust, the upcoming folk album from Bruce Springsteen, will be his nineteenth released album.
Hungarian-born composer Mátyás Seiber was killed in a car crash while on a lecture tour of South Africa.
A Pd/H2 electrode is a reference electrode similar to a standard hydrogen electrode (with platinum), but with the added ability to absorb molecular hydrogen.
Hamilton Palace in Scotland was lent for use as a naval hospital during World War I, by Alfred Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, 13th Duke of Hamilton.
Obolon CJSC, the largest Ukrainian brewer based in Kiev, was the first private company of the independent Ukraine.
The ancient marketplace of Rhapta on the east African coast is believed to have been an important link in bringing the spices cinnamon and cassia west by merchants.
Leonid Kadeniuk, the first astronaut of independent Ukraine, made his first space flight on NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997, and had been training for such a mission since 1976.
Godfrey Ho, a Hong-Kong based filmmaker, has been credited under more than 20 different pseudonyms.
The clapping game Mary Mack may refer to the Battle of Hampton Roads.
The Western Railway Corridor, built in the late 1800s, links Limerick to Sligo through the West of Ireland.
Scotopic sensitivity syndrome is a form of dyslexia which makes it very difficult for a person to read black text on white paper.
Playland, often called Rye Playland, is America's only government owned and operated amusement park.
Faculty members at the Stanford Institute for International Studies include Condoleezza Rice and William Perry.
The first person to formally convert to Buddhism in America was Charles T. Strauss, a New York businessman, in 1893.
A fire-control system is a computer which is designed to assist a weapon system in hitting its target(s).
Girls in Poland wear red lingerie underneath their dresses during a studniówka (high school ball).
The poorly studied Evermannellidae family, or Sabertooth fish, have oversized, inward curving teeth suggestive of the sabertooth cats' teeth.
Julia A. Moore inspired the character of Emmeline Grangerford in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The Asiatic Society of Bombay possesses one of the only two surviving original copies of Dante's The Divine Comedy.
Rugby union player Wayne Shelford suffered a ripped scrotum during an All Blacks match against France.
The film David and Lisa, shot in black-and-white for just $183,000, was nominated for the 1962 Academy Award for Directing.
The Battle of Appomattox Court House signalled the end of the American Civil War.
Reginald Hill's novel "A Clubbable Woman" was his first story about Dalziel and Pascoe.
Tumor markers are chemical substances found in blood that arise from the presence of cancerous tissues.
The Squirrel Nut Zippers were influenced by the energetic sounds of 1920s hot jazz.
Ateas, the best attested king of the Scythians, was killed in a battle with Philip II of Macedon at the age of 90.
An area of 500 hectares in the centre of Bucharest erased in the 1980s at the orders of Nicolae Ceauşescu was called Ceauşima by the Bucharest residents.
Shark threat display is an exaggerated swimming style exhibited by some sharks when they perceive they are in danger.
The Buddhist monk Tetsugen spent twenty years in an attempt to publish the Chinese scriptures of Buddhism in Japan, because he kept giving away the money he collected for the purpose.
Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña, the grandson of the late President of the Philippines Sergio Osmeña, was a Vice President of SEROS, Inc. and Apex Realty and Developers in California.
The Swedish art collector Rolf de Maré created the world's first museum and research institute for dance.
The his genitive was a briefly-used form for possessive nouns in the 17th century and may have given rise to the use of the apostrophe for genitives in Modern English.
Electrothermal-chemical technology can now almost double the muzzle energy of a tank gun.
When first introduced to England there was confusion over whether the Rouen duck was named after the Rhône region, Cardinal de Rohan, the colour roan, or the town Rouen.
Blair Cherry was the first high-school coach in Texas history to lead his team to three consecutive state championships.
Carl Westman was one of the first Swedish architects to design according to the Nordic National Romantic Style.
Despite operating a charity that has set up four clinics in the Indian city of Kolkata, British doctor Jack Preger has been ordered to leave the country India on at least one occasion.
Mandø, a Danish island in the Wadden Sea, has about as much land area in mudflat as its considerable arable land.
The most important source for early Irish history, the Chronicle of Ireland, is not an actual single chronicle but a hypothesized collection of ecclesiastical annals reconstructed from later, derivative works, because no original copies survived.
The simultaneous invasion of Georgia by the Soviet and Turkish forces threatened to develop into a Soviet-Turkish confrontation in 1921.
The concept of thermal death time was originally part of the canning industry but has also found applications in the cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
During World War II, Château de Valençay housed the statues Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo.
Peter, the Lord's cat is the only animal to be given an obituary in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack.
In the Battle of Seattle (1856), the native attackers' only common language was Chinook Jargon, so the settlers were able to hear and understand the attackers' shouted orders.
When the Transylvanian shepherd Badea Cârţan was found sleeping at the base of Trajan's Column in Rome in 1896, he was at first jokingly referred to as a Dacian who had fallen off a sculpted panel on the column and come to life.
At 49, Douglas A. Warner III became the youngest-ever CEO of J.P. Morgan & Co. Inc..
The influential architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux, who had amassed a handsome fortune working on the notoriously unpopular Wall of the Farmers-General, was arrested and thrown in La Force Prison during the French Revolution.
Channa, charioteer of Gautama Buddha, became a bhikkhu upon his master's attainment of buddhahood, and was frequently chastised for his arrogance.
Yury Dmitrievich was responsible for the destruction of the Tatar trade emporium at Zhukotin on the Kama River.
The cry "For our freedom and yours," one of the unofficial mottos of Poland, has been popularized by Polish soldiers, exiled from the partitioned Poland, who fought in various independence movements all over the world.
Ole Bull State Park in Pennsylvania is named for the renowned Norwegian violinist who tried to establish a Norwegian colony in the wilderness there in the 1850s.
Princess Marie Adélaïde, the fourth daughter and sixth child of Louis XV of France and his queen consort Maria Leszczyńska, died in exile in 1800 having outlived all nine of her siblings.
Calcot Manor in Gloucestershire sold its principal roof to an American new town that wished to emulate the appearance of a medieval European village.
Lyman Run State Park in Pennsylvania was the site of logging operations, a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, and a World War II prisoner-of-war camp before becoming a Pennsylvania state park in 1951.
The Jersey Shore, Pine Creek and Buffalo Railway, once promoted to connect the Pennsylvania-New York oil fields with New York City, instead became part of the New York Central's line to the coal mines around Clearfield, Pennsylvania.
The Polish capture of Wilno in 1919 set the stage for the future Polish-Soviet and Polish-Lithuanian Wars.
Honoré de Balzac once observed that "the heart of Paris today beats between rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin and rue du Faubourg Montmartre".
A fire that broke out a few days before Hiralal Sen died destroyed all his films including India's first political film.

End of preview. Expand in Data Studio

Wikipedia Did You Know Facts

A plain-text collection of ~41,755 short, self-contained facts taken from Wikipedia's "Did you know..." (DYK) hooks, with April Fools' Day joke hooks removed. Published by BRODILOFT.

Dataset Summary

Each line of the file is one fact written as a complete sentence, for example:

Sow thistles are named because they were fed to lactating sows.
Mary Hallaren was the first woman to join the United States Army.

The facts cover a wide range of topics (people, places, science, sports, games, history, culture) because DYK hooks are drawn from newly created or expanded Wikipedia articles across the whole encyclopedia.

Dataset Structure


File	`Wikifacts.txt`
Format	UTF-8 plain text, one fact per line
Rows	~41,755
Size	~5.3 MB
Line length	25 to 299 characters (median 125)
Duplicates	none (exact-match check)
Language	English

There are no splits, labels, or metadata columns. It is just the facts.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("BRODILOFT/wikifacts_crawled", split="train")
print(ds[0]["text"])

Or with no libraries at all:

with open("Wikifacts.txt", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    facts = [line.strip() for line in f if line.strip()]

Dataset Creation

Source

All facts come from Wikipedia's "Did you know" hooks. The original wording is written by Wikipedia editors.

Collection

Hooks were collected with a custom Python crawler. Hook lead-ins were stripped so each line reads as a standalone sentence, and exact duplicates were removed.

Filtering

Hooks from April Fools' Day were removed, since those are intentionally false or joke entries. Filtering was automated, so a small number of joke or low-quality hooks may remain.

Limitations and Caveats

Snapshot in time. A hook was accurate when it ran on Wikipedia. Statements like "the last surviving member of..." or "the late..." may be out of date.
Not fact-checked. These are Wikipedia's hooks as published and were not independently verified. Do not treat them as a source of truth.
Uneven coverage. DYK favors new and recently expanded articles, so topics that Wikipedia editors write about most are overrepresented.
Real people. Many facts mention real people, including living ones. All of it comes from public Wikipedia content.
Wikipedia's biases carry over. The dataset reflects the topic and geographic skews of English Wikipedia.

License and Attribution

The text of this dataset is derived from Wikipedia and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Attribution: Source text is from Wikipedia's "Did you know" hooks, written by Wikipedia contributors. See the history of the corresponding Wikipedia articles for authorship. Wikipedia content is available at https://www.wikipedia.org.
Share-alike: If you remix or build on this dataset, you must distribute your contributions under the same license.
Modifications: hook lead-ins were stripped, entries were deduplicated, and April Fools' Day hooks were removed.

Citation

@misc{brodiloft_wikipedia_dyk_facts,
  title  = {Wikipedia Did You Know Facts},
  author = {BRODILOFT},
  note   = {Derived from Wikipedia "Did you know" hooks. CC BY-SA 4.0.},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/BRODILOFT/wikifacts_crawled}
}

Contact

Website: https://brodiloft.free.je

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