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Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of all words in all languages. It is collaboratively edited via a wiki, and its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and dictionary. It is available in 171 languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians". Its wiki software, MediaWiki, allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries. Because Wiktionary is not limited by print space considerations, most of Wiktionary's language editions provide definitions and translations of words from many languages, and some editions offer additional information typically found in thesauri and lexicons. The English Wiktionary includes a thesaurus (formerly known as Wikisaurus) of synonyms of various words. Wiktionary data are frequently used in various natural language processing tasks.

8.1K
08 Nov 2022

Topic Review

Wife carrying (Finnish: eukonkanto or akankanto, Estonian: naisekandmine, Swedish: kärringkånk) is a contest in which male competitors race while each carrying a female teammate. The objective is for the male to carry the female through a special obstacle track in the fastest time. The sport was first introduced at Sonkajärvi, Finland . Several types of carrying may be practised: either a classic piggyback, a fireman's carry (over the shoulder), or Estonian-style (wife upside-down on his back with her legs over the neck and shoulders).

4.0K
11 Oct 2022

Topic Review

A wife is a female partner in a continuing marital relationship. The term continues to be applied to a woman who has separated from her partner, and ceases to be applied to such a woman only when her marriage has come to an end, following a legally recognized divorce or the death of her spouse. On the death of her partner, a wife is referred to as a widow, but not after she is divorced from her partner. The rights and obligations of a wife in relation to her partner and her status in the community and in law vary between cultures and have varied over time.

3.0K
17 Nov 2022

Topic Review

Widow Conservation

Widow conservation was a practice in Protestant Europe in the early modern age, when the widow of a parish vicar (or sometimes her daughter) would marry her husband's successor to the vicarage to ensure her economic support. The practice was common in Scandinavia (Änkekonservering/Enkekonservering) and Protestant parts of Germany (Konservierung von Pfarrwitwen). It is related to other forms of widow inheritance, including the levirate marriage known in the Old Testament as yibbum. At the introduction of the Protestant Reformation, priests were allowed to marry. However, as they did not own the vicarage and property attached to their profession, their wife and children were left without a home and means of support after their death. The future support of the widows and children of vicars thereby became a concern for the various churches. The most common solution was for the successor of a vicar to be required to marry the widow (or perhaps her daughter) of his predecessor, thereby "conserving" her.

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10 Nov 2022

Topic Review

A widow is a woman whose spouse has died and a widower is a man whose spouse has died. The treatment of widows and widowers around the world varies.

3.0K
25 Oct 2022

Topic Review

Wicked Problems

Wicked problem thinking is regaining interest in different disciplines, mostly because of the complex and interdependent contemporary issues that are particularly challenging for policy makers. This type of problems is difficult, even impossible to tackle by defining optimal solutions because of both deep uncertainty and high complexity. The causes and effects of wicked problems are cross-scale and multi-level; they are extremely difficult to identify due to the system dynamics and non-linear interactions. Thus, most of these problems are symptoms of or related to other problems. Moreover, wicked problems are poorly formulated and boundary-spanning issues where involved stakeholders bring different perspectives to the definitions and potential resolution of the issue. Indeed, the wicked nature stems from biophysical and social complexity, where divergent values related to multi-stakeholders’ perceptions and interests influence largely the problem-solving and determining desirable outcomes.

1.7K
28 Sep 2021

Topic Review

Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How is a 2016 non-fiction book by Ted Kaczynski.

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17 Nov 2022

Topic Review

White-Collar Employees for Sustainable Employability

This research evaluated a training intervention aimed at increasing the personal development curves of the ABC company’s white-collar employees and developing presentation preparation techniques.

222
12 Oct 2023

Topic Review

White Privilege

White privilege, or white skin privilege, is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people in some societies, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. With roots in European colonialism and imperialism, and the Atlantic slave trade, white privilege has developed in circumstances that have broadly sought to protect white racial privileges, various national citizenships, and other rights or special benefits. In the study of white privilege and its broader field of whiteness studies, both pioneered in the United States , academic perspectives such as critical race theory use the concept to analyze how racism and racialized societies affect the lives of white or white-skinned people. For example, American academic Peggy McIntosh described the advantages that whites in Western societies enjoy and non-whites do not experience as "an invisible package of unearned assets". White privilege denotes both obvious and less obvious passive advantages that white people may not recognize they have, which distinguishes it from overt bias or prejudice. These include cultural affirmations of one's own worth; presumed greater social status; and freedom to move, buy, work, play, and speak freely. The effects can be seen in professional, educational, and personal contexts. The concept of white privilege also implies the right to assume the universality of one's own experiences, marking others as different or exceptional while perceiving oneself as normal. Some scholars say that the term uses the concept of "whiteness" as a proxy for class or other social privilege or as a distraction from deeper underlying problems of inequality. Others state that it is not that whiteness is a proxy but that many other social privileges are interconnected with it, requiring complex and careful analysis to identify how whiteness contributes to privilege. Other commentators propose alternative definitions of whiteness and exceptions to or limits of white identity, arguing that the concept of white privilege ignores important differences between white subpopulations and individuals and suggesting that the notion of whiteness cannot be inclusive of all white people. They note the problem of acknowledging the diversity of people of color and ethnicity within these groups. Some commentators have observed that the "academic-sounding concept of white privilege" sometimes elicits defensiveness and misunderstanding among white people, in part due to how the concept of white privilege was rapidly brought into the mainstream spotlight through social media campaigns such as Black Lives Matter. As an academic concept that was only recently brought into the mainstream, the concept of white privilege is frequently misinterpreted by non-academics; some academics, having studied white privilege undisturbed for decades, have been surprised by the seemingly sudden hostility from right-wing critics since approximately 2014.

2.2K
14 Oct 2022

Topic Review

Flag White flags have had different meanings throughout history and depending on the locale.

12.9K
02 Nov 2022

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