hedgeblog/posts/wikipedia_rabbitholes.md

Wikipedia articles. I like them. The "Did you know" and "On this day" sections on the front page are real treasure troves. They have archives too, so you'll never run out of articles to read.

Here's a very incomplete (and maybe actively updated) list of ones that led to more clicks and were interesting to read:

• Second Anglo-Dutch War
• Koxinga, rogue Ming loyalist general who defeated the Dutch and Qing, to rule Taiwan
• Red Turban Rebellions and Chinese Manichaeism connected to each other through Manichaeian influence on the White Lotus Society
• List of Ethnic Groups in China
• Battle of Dien Bien Phu, where the Viet Minh kick out the French
• Battle of Saigon (1955)
• KHTML, made by KDE, which suprisingly is the parent of both Chrome (Blink) and Safari (Webkit)
• Syrian Civil War and it's numerous factions, like the non-secular Syrian Salvation Government rebels or the Kurdish Rojava (related: )
• Circassian Genocide, possibly the biggest genocide of the 19th century
• Basmachi movement, Central Asian rebellion against Soviet rule, with notable participant Enver Pasha, one of the Three Pashas who perpetrated the Armenian Genocide
• Saigo Takamori, Meiji Restoration and Satsuma Rebellion leader
• Shimabara Rebellion, Christian rebellion in Japan
• May 68, leftist French civil unrest
• Diffie-Hellman key exchange
• Xi'an Incident, where Chiang Kai-shek (leader of the Nationalists) is kidnapped by his generals Yang Hucheng and Chang Hsueh-liang, and forced to cooperate with the Communists against the invading Japanese
• Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned PKK leader
• Oda Nobunaga, extremely notable Japanese warlord, who was killed in the Honnō-ji Incident
• Ishiyama Hongan-ji, former Jōdo Shinshū temple/fortress, was burned down and replaced by Osaka Castle, and the reason why the city of Osaka exists
• Peninsular War, Napoleon's invasion of Spain and Portugal
• Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald, successful British Navy officer accused of stock exchange fraud, later participating in Liberating Expedition of Peru from the Spanish
• Indonesia invades East Timor to overthrow Fretilin
• Special Region of Yogyakarta, a region of Indonesia currently hereditarily ruled by the Yogyakarta Sultanate and the Duchy of Pakualaman
• Nanboku-chō period, when two opposing Japanese Imperial Courts existed, after the overthrow of the Kamakura Shogunate and the failure of the Kenmu Restoration
• COINTELPRO, where the FBI unsurprisingly misbehaves
• Transition to the New Order, where Suharto purges the Indonesian Communist Party, and overthrows Sukarno
• Crypto Wars, where the US Government tries to prevent the public and foreigners from using strong encryption
• The Battle of Blair Mountain, where striking coal members are bombed
• Haymarket Affair, where a bomb was thrown at police during a rally supporting the eight-hour work day
• Tigray War, a recent rebellion of the Tigrayan Government against the Ethiopian Government
• Timur, conquerer and founder of the Timurid Empire, self proclaimed successor of Genghis Khan, and ancestor of the Mughal Empire's founders
• Year of the Four Emperors, a period of civil war in the Roman Empire
• Frederick the Great, Prussian king, and military general
• Tadeusz Kościuszko, leader of the Polish-Lithuanian Kościuszko Uprising against Russian rule, and American Revolutionary War hero
• Favelas, Brazilian slums, some of which are ruled by cartels or vigilantes
• Princely State, Indian prince ruled territory under the British
• Annexation of Goa, India invades Portugese ruled Goa
• List of ethnic armed organisations in Myanmar
• Marcionism, early interpretation of Christianity
• Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den, shi shi shi shi...
• Fuke-shū, Shakuhachi playing, basket wearing, Zen Buddhism sect
• Zen Koans, "A monk asked Dongshan Shouchu, 'What is Buddha?' Dongshan said, 'Three pounds of flax.'"
• Shugendō, a religion combining Buddhism, folk religion, and Shinto mountain worship
• Spartacist uprising, crushed communist revolt during the early Weimar Republic
• Self-immolation
• Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, important French Foreign Minister/diplomat across the French Monarchy, revolution, and Napoleonic period, Bourbon Restoration
• Luigi Lucheni, anarchist assassin using a four-inch file as his weapon
• Hundred Days, Napoleon returns to power, briefly
• Green Corn Rebellion, anti-draft rebellion in Oklahoma, USA during WW1
• William Augustus Bowles, British leader of the Native American State of Muskogee
• Mexican Revolution
• Frozen Conflict
• Czechoslovak Legion, Czechoslovakian volunteer soldiers who found themselves in the middle of the Russian Civil War
• Yuan Shikai, who overthrew the Qing Dynasty, then tried and failed to proclaim himself emperor
• Wuchang Uprising
• Nio, guardians at the entrance of many Buddhist temples
• Mount Hiei, the location of Enryaku-ji
• Mongol Invasions of Japan
• Language Isolate, languages that aren't classified as part of larger language families
• Jiajing Wokou Raids, pirates
• Word (computer architecture)
• Transition from Ming to Qing
• Eighty Years' War, Dutch independence from Spain
• Abbasid Revolution, the Umayyad Caliphate is overthrown and replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate
• Operation Motorman, British military operation in Northern Ireland
• Green Armies in the Russian Civil War
• Recusants are those that did not support the Church of England after the English Reformation
• Terrorism Act 2000
• Pontoon bridge
• Francisco Macías Nguema, completely insane dictator of Equatorial Guinea
• Yazidism
• Göbekli Tepe, Neolithic archaeological site
• List of unsolved problems in mathematics
• Hartal, Indian strike action
• Achaemenid Empire, very big, pretty cool
• The Camden 28, anti-Vietnam War activists
• Howard Zinn, controversial historian
• Gnosticism was a set of early Christian beliefs
• TempleOS
• Grendel's mother, an antagonist in the Old English epic poem, Beowulf, who scholars debate whether is a monster or just a female warrior
• Epic of Gilgamesh, Sumerian epic poem
• An Lushan Rebellion, An Lushan rebels, greatly weakened the Tang Dynasty
• Bahmani Sultanate, South Indian empire
• Pagan Empire, the first Burmese kingdom
• Warsaw Uprising
• Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
• Atoll
• Chambre introuvable, ultra-royalists Chamber of Deputies elected after the Second Bourbon Restoration
• Fedayeen
• Battle of Nagashino, where Takeda Katsuyori learns it is not a good idea to cavalry charge into gunfire
• Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen, related to the Battle of Nagashino above, but too interesting to leave out
• Battle of Bannockburn, decisive Scottish victory in the First War of Scottish Independence
• Three Gorges, are three gorges, in China
• Annexation of Hyderabad
• Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (9th century)
• List of coups and coup attempts
• Lazarus Group, North Korean hackers
• Pasquale Paoli, Corsican nationalist admired by Napoleon
• Doge (title), like a King, but elected
• Frank Serpico, New York Police Department whistleblower
• Inner Mongolia Incident, part of the Cultural Revolution
• Nationalist Party of Puerto_Rico
• Rotating locomotion in living systems
• Japanese dialects
• Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Ukrainian oligarch
• Anglophone Crisis, war in Cameroon due to tensions between English speakers and French speakers
• Kivu conflict
• History of Somalia
• Migration Period, which led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire
• Hydrofoil
• General Sherman (tree), very big and very old
• Simón Bolívar, South American revolutionary hero
• Battle of Dibrivka
• Battle of the Teutoburg Forest
• Intentional Community
• Jellyfish are apparently "the informal common names given to the medusa-phase of certain gelatinous members of the subphylum Medusozoa"
• Sinecure, get paid to do nothing
• Yelü Dashi, founder of the Western Liao dynasty
• List of Unicode characters
• Operation Cyclone, where the CIA funds Islamist groups to fight against the communist Afghan government
• Witold Pilecki, brave Polish soldier who intentionally got sent to Auschwitz to spy, then voluntarily returned to Communist Poland, again to spy, and was executed
• Ascall mac Ragnaill, Last Norse-Gaelic King of Dublin
• Iodine, the element
• Riot control
• Feoffment, land for loyalty
• Kent State shootings, US National Guard shoots students protesting against US involvement in Cambodia during the Vietnam War
• Mountain men
• 1728 Musin Rebellion against the Korean Joseon Dynasty
• Kurt Gödel, mathematician
• Joe Hill
• Dual_EC_DRBG, a (probably) NSA backdoored random number generator
• English-based creole languages
• Austro-Hungarian concession of Tianjin
• Steve Mann (inventor), inventor of wearable computing technology
• Kronstadt rebellion, revolt against the Bolsheviks by Soviet soldiers
• Great Purge, Stalin purges a lot of people
• Iranian Revolution
• Cultural Revolution, which didn't turn out very well at all
• National Treasure (Japan)
• Protozoa
• Akira Kurosawa, filmmaker
• Isle of Man
• Fantastic War, fought between Spain and Portugal as part of the Seven Years' War. Was not fantastic for Spain, since they lost
• Nikoli, publisher of puzzle gmaes like Sudoku
• Sikkim
• Subutai, Mongol general who invaded Hungary
• Free speech fights, usually suppression of labour issue related speech
• Sesshū Tōyō, painter
• Java War (1741–1743)
• Tuareg people
• Amnesty International
• Julian Assange
• Bukharian (Judeo-Tajik dialect)
• Qt (software), for developing GUIs
• Sailfish OS
• SerenityOS