Wikipedia (i/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/ or i/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a free, collaboratively edited and multilingual Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 22 million articles (over 0 million in English alone) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors. As of June 2012, there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide. It is estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.
Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined the name Wikipedia, which is a portmanteau of wiki (a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the presence of a large body of unacademic content have received extensive attention in print media. In its 2006 Person of the Year article, Time magazine recognized the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world. It cited Wikipedia as an example, in addition to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. Wikipedia has also been praised as a news source because of how quickly articles about recent events appear. Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.
Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 – August 13, 2009)—known as Les Paul—was an American jazz and country guitarist, songwriter and inventor. He was the inventor of the solid-body electric guitar which made the sound of rock and roll possible. He is credited with many recording innovations. Although he was not the first to use the technique, his early experiments with overdubbing (also known as sound on sound),delay effects such as tape delay, phasing effects and multitrack recording were among the first to attract widespread attention.
His innovative talents extended into his playing style, including licks, trills, chording sequences, fretting techniques and timing, which set him apart from his contemporaries and inspired many guitarists of the present day. He recorded with his wife Mary Ford in the 1950s, and they sold millions of records.
Among his many honors, Paul is one of a handful of artists with a permanent, stand-alone exhibit in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is prominently named by the music museum on its website as an "architect" and a "key inductee" along with Sam Phillips and Alan Freed.
Mary Ford (July 7, 1924–September 30, 1977), born Iris Colleen Summers, was an American vocalist and guitarist, comprising half of the husband-and-wife musical team Les Paul and Mary Ford. Between 1950 and 1954, the couple had 16 top-ten hits, including "How High the Moon" and Vaya con Dios", which were number one hits on the Billboard charts. In 1951 alone they sold six million records. With Paul, Ford became one of the early practitioners of multi-tracking.
Mary Ford was born Iris Colleen Summers in El Monte, California, the second daughter of Marshall McKinley Summers (born February 13, 1896 in Ridgway, Illinois; died August 5, 1981 in Los Angeles, California), a Nazarene minister, who later became a painting contractor, and his wife, Dorothy May White Summers (born April 5, 1897 in Missouri; died February 22, 1988 in South El Monte, California), and was the sister of Byron Fletcher Summers (born December 25, 1918 in Missouri; died April 2, 1994), Esther Eva Summers Wootten (born 1922 in Los Angeles, California), and Bruce Wendell Summers (born February 22, 1929 in California; died November 15, 2007). Ford came from a musical family, and her parents left Missouri, traveling cross-country while singing gospel music and preaching at revival meetings across the United States. They eventually settled in Southern California, where they were heard over KPPC-AM, Pasadena's first Christian radio station. Her sisters and brothers were all musicians; Esther, Carol, Fletcher, jazz organist Bruce and film composer Bob Summers.
Antony Hopkins CBE (born 21 March 1921) is an English composer, pianist, conductor, and radio broadcaster.
Hopkins was born in London under the name Ernest William Antony Reynolds; his surname was changed to Hopkins after he was adopted by a master at Berkhamsted School following the death of his father.
His works include the operas Lady Rohesia (1947) (based on the Ingoldsby Legends of sixteenth-century England), The Man from Tuscany, and Three's Company (1953); the ballet Café des Sports; and Scena for soprano and strings (which was later arranged for three solo voices and full orchestra).[1]
Hopkins has written extensively for films, including Here Come the Huggetts (1948), The Pickwick Papers (1952), Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), and Billy Budd (1962).[2]. In the 1970s, he revived the long forgotten oratorio Ruth (infamous as 'the Worst Oratorio in the World' ) by English composer George Tolhurst; this was heard again in 2009 on BBC Radio 3 programme "The Choir".
However, he is perhaps best known for his books of musical analysis and, particularly, for his radio programmes Talking About Music broadcast for many years by the BBC.