Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Simple Wikipedia Explains Earth

I just love Simple English Wikipedia, the attempt to recreate Wikipedia in English understood by those with little grasp of the language. Here’s the article on Earth (slightly expanding on “mostly harmless”):

Earth is the planet that humans live on. It has only one moon. Earth orbits the Sun every 365.2564 days. The Sun provides light that shines onto the Earth.

Earth spins like a basket bell on dennis rodmans finger (that means it turns around itself) so each part of it is in light during the day and dark at night. Just the right amount of sunlight reaches Earth to keep its water from freezing, but not enough to turn it into steam. The surface of the Earth is mostly covered by salty water in its oceans. It has seven continents which rise above the oceans to make land, while one (Antarctica), is covered by a lot of ice, with very little land above the ice. There are also a lot of smaller islands.

The Earth’s poles are bloody cold and covered with ice because they get less sunlight than other parts.

The heat from the sun makes feel hot and sticky the oceans turn into steam to make clouds and change the Earth’s weather. Rain falls on the land and we get terribly wet!dont forget your brolly!! to form many rivers which have shaped the land.

The Earth is the only place humans know about which has internet. The Earth’s liquid water makes internet possible. The places with the smallest amount of rain are called deserts. There is not a lot of internet in the deserts.only in scotland!

As to how earth began, Simple Wikipedia proposes different theories, arguing no one can know for sure. The article points out that the best idea scientists had is that “Earth was formed from a flat circle of gas and dust around 4.55 billion years ago, and that gravity (the force that holds everything together) pulled the gas into a bigger and bigger ball of molten rock that cooled down very slowly over millions of years”, adding that “i think that some one just threw a rock in to space and thats what killed the dinosaurs and made fred flintstone.”

[Wikipedia article GNU-licensed. Image courtesy of NASA.]

Simple Wikipedia Explains ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (6)

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