Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 2004

The Today's Featured Article section was started on February 22, 2004 as part of a then-new Main Page design. Before these changes, the Main Page included no blurbs and instead included a short list of links to four featured articles, among others.^[1]

February 22

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of the most significant classical composers. Mozart lived just a little over half of Beethoven's life span, yet was amazingly prolific from early childhood until his death in 1791. (more ...)

Recently featured: Economics - Rembrandt - Blackjack

February 23

The Irish Houses of Parliament was the world's first purpose-built two-chamber parliament house. It served as the seat of both chambers of the Irish parliament of the Kingdom of Ireland for most of the eighteenth century until that parliament was abolished in the Irish Act of Union in 1800. (more...)

Recently featured: Mozart - Electoral College - Rudyard Kipling

February 24

Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman military and political leader whose conquest of Gallia Comata extended the Roman world all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and introduced Roman influence into what is now France. His dramatic assassination on the Ides of March became the catalyst of a second set of Roman civil wars, which became the twilight of the Roman Republic and the dawn of the Roman Empire. (more ...)

Recently featured: Irish Houses of Parliament - Mozart - U.S. Electoral College

February 25

Oxyrhynchus is an archaeological site in Egypt, one of the most important ever discovered. For the past century the area around Oxyrhynchus has been continuously excavated, yielding an enormous collection of papyrus texts from the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods of Egyptian history. Among the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus are plays of Menander and the so-called Gospel of Thomas, an important early Christian document. (more ...)

Recently featured: Julius Caesar - Irish Houses of Parliament - Mozart

February 26

Bible codes, also known as Torah codes, are meaningful words and phrases that some people believe exist intentionally in coded form in the text of the Bible, while others contend that they can be found in any long text (including Moby Dick). The primary method used to find such words is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS). To extract an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (any letter) and a skip (a number, possibly negative). The 13th century Spanish rabbi Bachya ben Asher was the first to describe an ELS in the Bible. (more...)

Recently featured: Oxyrhynchus - Julius Caesar - Irish Houses of Parliament

February 27

Psychosis is a psychiatric classification for a mental state in which the perception of reality is distorted. Persons experiencing a psychotic episode may experience hallucinations (often auditory or visual hallucinations), hold paranoid or delusional beliefs and exhibit disorganized thinking (see thought disorder). This is often accompanied by a lack of insight into the unusual or bizarre nature of their behaviour. (more...)

Recently featured: Bible codes - Oxyrhynchus - Julius Caesar

February 28

The periodic table of the chemical elements is a display of known chemical elements arranged by electron structure. The German Lothar Meyer and the Russian chemist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev almost simultaneously developed the first periodic table by arranging the elements by atomic mass. (more...)

Recently featured: Psychosis - Bible codes - Oxyrhynchus

February 29

LSD is a powerful synthetic hallucinogen and psychedelic entheogen originally derived from ergot fungus. It is typically delivered orally as a clear, odorless, tasteless liquid, usually on a substrate such as absorbent blotter paper, a sugarcube, or gelatin, although it is also possible to deliver it via food or drink. It is an abbreviation of the German term for the compound, Lyserg-Säure-Diäthylamid. (more...)

Recently featured: Periodic table - Psychosis - Bible codes