From when it started, Nupedia was a free content encyclopedia. Bomis, Jimmy Wales' company, was going to get money from adverts on the Nupedia website. At first, the project used a license that was made up by Wales and Sanger. Later, it began using the Nupedia Open Content License. In January 2001, it switched to the GNU Free Documentation License. This was because Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation said they should.
Also in January 2001, Nupedia started Wikipedia. At first, it was not meant to be an encyclopedia. Instead, it was meant as a side-project to allow people to work on articles for Nupedia before they were peer reviewed. As Wikipedia got bigger and attracted new users, it began to run without Nupedia. However, Larry Sanger first led activity on Wikipedia. This was because he was the chief editor on Nupedia.
Wikipedia led to the gradual shutdown of Nupedia. Jimmy Wales decided to stop paying Sanger in December 2001. Sanger then left both Nupedia and Wikipedia. After Sanger left, Nupedia became even less noticed than Wikipedia. As Nupedia was used less and less, the idea of changing its articles into Wikipedia articles was sometimes proposed. However, it was never done. After it closed down, Nupedia's articles were moved in to Wikipedia.
Nupedia's articles were all peer reviewed. These were the steps they had to follow:
People who wrote for Nupedia were supposed to be experts in what they wrote about. However, some articles could be written by a good writer, rather than an expert. People who "changed" content on Nupedia were expected to be "true experts in their fields and (with few exceptions) possess PhDs", which means that they should be experts in what they are changing and (generally) have PhDs.
Article (grammar)
An article is a word that comes before a noun. There are two kinds of articles: definite articles and indefinite articles.
In English there is just one definite article: "the". There are two indefinite articles: "a" and "an". The word "an" is used before a word starting with a vowel sound (not necessarily a vowel letter): we say "a horse", "a child", "a European" (European has a "Y" sound, /j/, which is a consonant sound), "a university", but "an orange", "an elephant".
Some languages have more than one word for "the". In some languages, this is because each noun is either masculine or feminine or, in some languages it can be masculine, feminine or neuter. For example: in French "le" is used for masculine nouns ("le jardin" - "the garden") and "la" for feminine nouns ("la table" - "the table"). "The" becomes "les" in front of plural nouns. The indefinite articles in French are "un" (masculine) and "une" (feminine). German, Dutch and Ancient Greek have masculine, feminine and neuter nouns, but in the case of Dutch the word for "the" is the same for masculine and feminine ("de") so you do not need to know which it is. The Māori language uses one word for "the" for when the subject or object to which the "the" refers is one in number, and uses another word for "the" when the subject or object to which the "the" refers numbers more than one.
There are also many languages that do not have articles. Some examples include Russian, , Japanese, and Chinese. When speakers of these languages are learning English, it is often difficult to explain to them what an article is because English speakers use them naturally. Even though these languages do not have articles, they still have grammatical features that allow them to show definiteness.
In general: "the" in English is used for something you already know about or have already been talking about. The word "a" is used when introducing a new idea:
"The tired woman was looking for her cat. Suddenly she saw "the" cat up "a" tree". (We are already talking about the cat. The tree is a new idea).
"The tired woman was walking along when she suddenly saw "a" cat up "a" tree". (She had not been thinking about cats until then).
Sometimes we do not need an article, for example when talking about something in general:
"The dogs do not bite" (meaning: dogs that you are thinking about).
"Barking dogs do not bite" (barking dogs in general).
Waterfront
Waterfront is the land by the side of a body of water (E.g. Lake or Ocean).
East Asia
East Asia or Eastern Asia is part of the continent Asia. East Asia covers about , or 15% of the continent.
These are the countries and territories in East Asia:
About 1,575,784,500 people live in East Asia ().
List of counties of the Republic of China
Taiwan Province is divided into 13 counties (縣; hsien) and 3 provincial cities (市; shih):
"Note":The cities of Taipei and Kaohsiung are managed directly by the central government and are not part of Taiwan province, though the counties of the same name all around these cities are part of the province. The People's Republic of China, which does not control Taiwan Province, does not recognize Taipei and Kaohsiung as central cities and lists them as provincial cities.
Tbilisi
Tbilisi is the capital, and the largest city in Georgia. It was founded in the 5th century by the Georgian king, Vakhtang Gorgasali. According to legend, when he was hunting, he killed a pheasant which dropped into hot water. Gorgasali discovered there were a lot of hot springs in this place, which he called Tbilisi as "tbili" means hot in Georgian.
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Robot
A robot is a machine that can move and do certain tasks.
Robots are controlled by a computer program or electronic circuitry. They may be directly controlled by humans. They may be designed to look like humans, in which case their behaviour may suggest intelligence or thought but they do not have feelings. Most robots do a specific job, and they do not always look like humans. They can come in many forms.
In fiction, however, robots usually look like people, and seem to have a life of their own. There are many books, movies, and video games with robots in them. Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" is perhaps the most famous.
People have been interested in building machines to do work for us for a long time. But it takes time and money to build just one machine, so early ideas were not built.
Leonardo da Vinci designed a man-shaped machine to look like a knight in 1464. It would be controlled with ropes and wheels.
Other engineers and dreamers drew mechanical men. In 1920, Karel Čapek wrote a story about them, and he used a word from Czech that is connected with 'work': robot.
The most successful robot designs in the 20th century were not made to look like people. They were designed for use. George Devol made the first of these, the Unimate, in 1954, with one arm and one hand. General Motors bought it in 1960. The next year, it started work in a factory in New Jersey, lifting and stacking pieces of metal that were too hot for people to touch. The engineers could program it, and reprogram it if they had to.
Robots have many uses. Many factories use robots to do hard work quickly and without many mistakes. They do not look like people, because they are made to do things. These are 'industrial' robots. Some robots find and get rid of bombs. If someone makes a mistake, the robot is damaged or destroyed, which is better than a person being killed. There are also robots that help at home, to vacuum or run a lawn mower, for example. Such robots must learn about the area of work.
A few robots do surgery in places inside the body where a human hand is too big.
Planet rovers are robots for exploring distant planets. Because it takes a long time to send a radio signal from Earth to another planet, the robots do much of their work alone, without commands from Earth.
People still think of robots as having a shape like a person—two legs, two arms, and a head. ASIMO is one robot that is helping scientists learn how to design and program robots. It can walk, which is not easy to program.