Portal:World

The World Portal

The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts.

In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world.

In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". (Full article...)

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Selected articles - show another

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Economic globalization is one of the three main dimensions of globalization commonly found in academic literature, with the two others being political globalization and cultural globalization, as well as the general term of globalization.
Economic globalization refers to the widespread international movement of goods, capital, services, technology and information. It is the increasing economic integration and interdependence of national, regional, and local economies across the world through an intensification of cross-border movement of goods, services, technologies and capital. Economic globalization primarily comprises the globalization of production, finance, markets, technology, organizational regimes, institutions, corporations, and people.

While economic globalization has been expanding since the emergence of trans-national trade, it has grown at an increased rate due to improvements in the efficiency of long-distance transportation, advances in telecommunication, the importance of information rather than physical capital in the modern economy, and by developments in science and technology. The rate of globalization has also increased under the framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization, in which countries gradually cut down trade barriers and opened up their current accounts and capital accounts. This recent boom has been largely supported by developed economies integrating with developing countries through foreign direct investment, lowering costs of doing business, the reduction of trade barriers, and in many cases cross-border migration. (Full article...)
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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution funded by 190 member countries, with headquarters in Washington, D.C. It is regarded as the global lender of last resort to national governments, and a leading supporter of exchange-rate stability. Its stated mission is "working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world."

Established in 27 Dec 1945 (Full article...)
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The Web's former logo designed by Robert Cailliau

The World Wide Web ("WWW", "W3" or simply "the Web") is a global information medium that users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN in 1989. He proposed a "universal linked information system" using several concepts and technologies, the most fundamental of which was the connections that existed between information. He developed the first web server, the first web browser, and a document formatting protocol, called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). After publishing the markup language in 1991, and releasing the browser source code for public use in 1993, many other web browsers were soon developed, with Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (later Netscape Navigator), being particularly easy to use and install, and often credited with sparking the Internet boom of the 1990s. It was a graphical browser which ran on several popular office and home computers, bringing multimedia content to non-technical users by including images and text on the same page. (Full article...)
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Poster advertising the Brussels International Exposition in 1897

A world's fair, also known as a universal exhibition or an expo, is a large global exhibition designed to showcase the achievements of nations. These exhibitions vary in character and are held in different parts of the world at a specific site for a period of time, typically between three and six months.

The term "world's fair" is commonly used in the United States, while the French term, Exposition universelle ("universal exhibition") is used in most of Europe and Asia; other terms include World Expo or Specialised Expo, with the word expo used for various types of exhibitions since at least 1958. (Full article...)
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The FIFA World Cup, often simply called the World Cup, is an international association football competition among the senior men's national teams of the members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport's global governing body. The tournament has been held every four years since the inaugural tournament in 1930, with the exception of 1942 and 1946 due to the Second World War. The reigning champions are Argentina, who won their third title at the 2022 tournament.

The contest starts with the qualification phase, which takes place over the preceding three years to determine which teams qualify for the tournament phase. In the tournament phase, 32 teams compete for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over the course of about a month. The host nation(s) automatically qualify for the group stage of the tournament. The competition is scheduled to expand to 48 teams, starting with the 2026 tournament. (Full article...)
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Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders.

Its existence was not widely acknowledged by governments and the mainstream media until the global surveillance disclosures by Edward Snowden triggered a debate about the right to privacy in the Digital Age. One such debate is the balance which governments must acknowledge between the pursuit of national security and counter-terrorism over a right to privacy. Although, to quote H. Akın Ünver "Even when conducted for national security and counterterrorism purposes, the scale and detail of mass citizen data collected, leads to rightfully pessimistic observations about individual freedoms and privacy". (Full article...)
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The Arab world (Arabic: اَلْعَالَمُ الْعَرَبِيُّ al-ʿālam al-ʿarabī), formally the Arab homeland (اَلْوَطَنُ الْعَرَبِيُّ al-waṭan al-ʿarabī), also known as the Arab nation (اَلْأُمَّةُ الْعَرَبِيَّةُ al-ummah al-ʿarabīyyah), the Arabsphere, or the Arab states, comprises a large group of countries, mainly located in Western Asia and Northern Africa. While the majority of people in the Arab world are ethnically Arab, there are also significant populations of other ethnic groups such as Berbers, Kurds, Somalis and Nubians, among other groups. Arabic is used as the lingua franca throughout the Arab world.

The Arab world is at its minimum defined as the 19 states where Arabs form at least a plurality of the population. At its maximum it consists of the 22 members of the Arab League, an international organization, which on top of the 19 plurality Arab states also includes the Comoros, Djibouti and Somalia. The region stretches from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Indian Ocean in the southeast. The eastern part of the Arab world is known as the Mashriq, and the western part as the Maghreb. (Full article...)

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General images - load new batch

The following are images from various world-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Florence, birthplace of the Italian Renaissance
Image 2"Lucy", the first Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found. Lucy was only 1.06 m (3 ft 6 in) tall.
Image 3Artist's impression of a Hadean landscape with the relatively newly formed Moon still looming closely over Earth and both bodies sustaining strong volcanism. (from History of Earth)
Image 4Taj Mahal, Mughal Empire, India
Image 5Notre-Dame de Paris, France
Image 6Pangaea was a supercontinent that existed from about 300 to 180 Ma. The outlines of the modern continents and other landmasses are indicated on this map. (from History of Earth)
Image 7An artist's impression of ice age Earth at glacial maximum. (from History of Earth)
Image 8Artist's rendition of an oxinated fully-frozen Snowball Earth with no remaining liquid surface water. (from History of Earth)
Image 9Artist's impression of the enormous collision that probably formed the Moon (from History of Earth)
Image 10Exaggerated illustration of Earth's elliptical orbit around the Sun, marking that the orbital extreme points (apoapsis and periapsis) are not the same as the four seasonal extreme points, the equinox and solstice (from Earth)
Image 11A pillar at Göbekli Tepe
Image 12Ajloun Castle, Jordan
Image 13Great Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
Image 14A view of Earth with different layers of its atmosphere visible: the troposphere with its clouds casting shadows, a band of stratospheric blue sky at the horizon, and a line of green airglow of the lower thermosphere around an altitude of 100 km, at the edge of space (from Earth)
Image 15Satellite time lapse imagery of Earth's rotation showing axis tilt (from Earth)
Image 16Moai, Rapa Nui (Easter Island)
Image 17Relief of Earth's crust (from Earth)
Image 18Earth's history with time-spans of the eons to scale (from History of Earth)
Image 19A reconstruction of Pannotia (550 Ma). (from History of Earth)
Image 20A map of heat flow from Earth's interior to the surface of Earth's crust, mostly along the oceanic ridges (from Earth)
Image 21Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989
Image 22Dinosaurs were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates throughout most of the Mesozoic (from History of Earth)
Image 23Battle during 1281 Mongol invasion of Japan
Image 24Conjectured illustration of the scorched Earth after the Sun has entered the red giant phase, about 5–7 billion years from now (from Earth)
Image 25A composite image of Earth, with its different types of surface discernible: Earth's surface dominating Ocean (blue), Africa with lush (green) to dry (brown) land and Earth's polar ice in the form of Antarctic sea ice (grey) covering the Antarctic or Southern Ocean and the Antarctic ice sheet (white) covering Antarctica. (from Earth)
Image 26A 2012 artistic impression of the early Solar System's protoplanetary disk from which Earth and other Solar System bodies were formed (from Earth)
Image 27Graph showing range of estimated partial pressure of atmospheric oxygen through geologic time (from History of Earth)
Image 28A Benin Bronze head from Nigeria
Image 29Tiktaalik, a fish with limb-like fins and a predecessor of tetrapods. Reconstruction from fossils about 375 million years old. (from History of Earth)
Image 30Geologic map of North America, color-coded by age. From most recent to oldest, age is indicated by yellow, green, blue, and red. The reds and pinks indicate rock from the Archean.
Image 31Cross-section through a liposome (from History of Earth)
Image 32An artist's impression of the Archean, the eon after Earth's formation, featuring round stromatolites, which are early oxygen-producing forms of life from billions of years ago. After the Late Heavy Bombardment, Earth's crust had cooled, its water-rich barren surface is marked by continents and volcanoes, with the Moon still orbiting Earth half as far as it is today, appearing 2.8 times larger and producing strong tides. (from Earth)
Image 33Olmec colossal head, now at the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa
Image 34Earth's night-side upper atmosphere appearing from the bottom as bands of afterglow illuminating the troposphere in orange with silhouettes of clouds, and the stratosphere in white and blue. Next the mesosphere (pink area) extends to the orange and faintly green line of the lowest airglow, at about one hundred kilometers at the edge of space and the lower edge of the thermosphere (invisible). Continuing with green and red bands of aurorae stretching over several hundred kilometers. (from Earth)
Image 35First airplane, the Wright Flyer, flew on 17 December 1903.
Image 36Artist's conception of Devonian flora (from History of Earth)
Image 37View of Earth from the Moon by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (from Earth)
Image 38A 580 million year old fossil of Spriggina floundensi, an animal from the Ediacaran period. Such life forms could have been ancestors to the many new forms that originated in the Cambrian Explosion. (from History of Earth)
Image 39A view of Earth with its global ocean and cloud cover, which dominate Earth's surface and hydrosphere; at Earth's polar regions, its hydrosphere forms larger areas of ice cover. (from Earth)
Image 40Machu Picchu, Inca Empire, Peru
Image 41The Pantheon, originally a Roman temple, now a Catholic church
Image 42The replicator in virtually all known life is deoxyribonucleic acid. DNA is far more complex than the original replicator and its replication systems are highly elaborate. (from History of Earth)
Image 43Angkor Wat temple complex, Cambodia, early 12th century
Image 44Image of the physical world, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (from World)
Image 45Last Moon landing: Apollo 17 (1972)
Image 46Chloroplasts in the cells of a moss (from History of Earth)
Image 47Infantry of the Royal Irish Rifles during the Battle of the Somme in World War I
Image 48Change in average surface air temperature and drivers for that change. Human activity has caused increased temperatures, with natural forces adding some variability. (from Earth)
Image 49Yggdrasil, an attempt to reconstruct the Norse world tree which connects the heavens, the world, and the underworld. (from World)
Image 50Earth's axial tilt causing different angles of seasonal illumination at different orbital positions around the Sun (from Earth)
Image 51A High Desert storm in the Mojave (from Earth)
Image 52Empires of the world in 1898
Image 53Hagia Sophia, Istanbul – a symbol of Byzantine civilization
Image 54The pale orange dot, an artist's impression of the early Earth which might have appeared orange through its hazy methane rich prebiotic second atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere at this stage was somewhat comparable to today's atmosphere of Titan. (from History of Earth)
Image 55Great Mosque of Kairouan, Tunisia, founded 670 CE
Image 56A composite image of artificial light emissions at night on a map of Earth (from Earth)
Image 57A computer-generated image mapping the prevalence of artificial satellites and space debris around Earth in geosynchronous and low Earth orbit (from Earth)
Image 58Chennakesava Temple, Belur, India
Image 59Lithified stromatolites on the shores of Lake Thetis, Western Australia. Archean stromatolites are the first direct fossil traces of life on Earth. (from History of Earth)
Image 60Astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, photographed by Neil Armstrong, 1969 (from History of Earth)
Image 61Earth's western hemisphere showing topography relative to Earth's center instead of to mean sea level, as in common topographic maps (from Earth)
Image 62Venus figurine, Germany, c. 37,500 BCE
Image 63Tracy Caldwell Dyson, a NASA astronaut, observing Earth from the Cupola module at the International Space Station on 11 September 2010 (from Earth)
Image 64Shanghai. China urbanized rapidly in the 21st century.
Image 65Pillar erected by India's Maurya Emperor Ashoka
Image 66Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci epitomizes the advances in art and science seen during the Renaissance. (from History of Earth)
Image 67Earth's major plates, which are:
(from Earth)
Image 68A schematic view of Earth's magnetosphere with solar wind flowing from left to right (from Earth)
Image 69Standing Buddha from Gandhara, 2nd century CE
Image 70Ming dynasty section, Great Wall of China
Image 71Cave paintings, Lascaux, France, c. 17,000 BCE
Image 72Earth's land use for human agriculture in 2019 (from Earth)
Image 73A banded iron formation from the 3.15 Ga Moodies Group, Barberton Greenstone Belt, South Africa. Red layers represent the times when oxygen was available; gray layers were formed in anoxic circumstances. (from History of Earth)
Image 74Wittenberg, birthplace of Protestantism (from Human history)
Image 75Map of peopling of the world (Southern Dispersal paradigm), in thousands of years ago.
Image 76St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City
Image 77Maya observatory, Chichen Itza, Mexico
Image 78Earth and the Moon as seen from Mars by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (from Earth)
Image 79Artist's impression of Earth during the later Archean, the largely cooled planetary crust and water-rich barren surface, marked by volcanoes and continents, features already round microbialites. The Moon, still orbiting Earth much closer than today and still dominating Earth's sky, produced strong tides. (from History of Earth)
Image 80Cuneiform inscription, Sumer, Mesopotamia, 26th century BCE
Image 81Scientific worldview. (from World)
Image 82James Watt's steam engine powered the Industrial Revolution.
Image 83An artist's rendering of a protoplanetary disk (from History of Earth)
Image 84Persepolis, Achaemenid Empire, 6th century BCE
Image 85A reconstruction of human history based on fossil data. (from History of Earth)
Image 86Japanese depiction of a Portuguese carrack. European maritime innovations led to proto-globalization.
Image 87An animation of the changing density of productive vegetation on land (low in brown; heavy in dark green) and phytoplankton at the ocean surface (low in purple; high in yellow) (from Earth)
Image 88Trilobites first appeared during the Cambrian period and were among the most widespread and diverse groups of Paleozoic organisms. (from History of Earth)
Image 89Artist's conception of Hadean Eon Earth, when it was much hotter and inhospitable to all forms of life. (from History of Earth)
Image 90Atomic bombing of Nagasaki, 1945
Image 91Pale orange dot, an artist's impression of Early Earth, featuring its tinted orange methane-rich early atmosphere (from Earth)
Image 92Obelisk of Axum, Ethiopia

Megacities of the world - show another

Skyline of São Paulo from Jardins

São Paulo (/ˌsaʊ ˈpaʊloʊ/, Portuguese: [sɐ̃w ˈpawlu] ^ⓘ; Portuguese for 'Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil and the capital of the state of São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as an alpha global city, São Paulo is the most populous city outside of Asia and the world's 20th-largest city proper by population. Additionally, São Paulo is the largest Portuguese-speaking city in the world. It exerts strong international influences in commerce, finance, arts, and entertainment. The city's name honors the Apostle, Saint Paul of Tarsus. The city's metropolitan area, the Greater São Paulo, ranks as the most populous in Brazil and the 12th-most-populous on Earth. The process of conurbation between the metropolitan areas around the Greater São Paulo (Campinas, Santos, Jundiaí, Sorocaba and São José dos Campos) created the São Paulo Macrometropolis, a megalopolis with more than 30 million inhabitants, one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world.

São Paulo has the largest economy by GDP of the cities of Latin America, and the 23rd largest city GDP in the world, representing 10.7% of the Brazilian GDP and 36% of the goods and services produced in the state of São Paulo. The city is home to the São Paulo Stock Exchange, as well as 63% of established multinationals in Brazil. Paulista Avenue is the economic core of São Paulo. (Full article...)

List of megacities
Bangalore Bangkok Beijing Bogotá Buenos Aires Cairo Chengdu Chennai Chongqing Delhi Dhaka Guangzhou Hangzhou Ho Chi Minh City Hyderabad Istanbul Istanbul Jakarta Karachi Keihanshin Kinshasa Kolkata Lagos Lahore Lima London Los Angeles Manila Mexico City Moscow Mumbai Nagoya New York City Paris Rhine-Ruhr Rio de Janeiro Seoul Shanghai Shenzhen Tehran Tianjin Tokyo Xiamen

Did you know - load new batch

... that Salvatorian priest Pankratius Pfeiffer saved hundreds of Jews in Rome during the Second World War?
... that during World War II, Terry Sanford captured a German officer by grabbing him by the belt?
... that during the First World War, Adrian Becher received his second Military Cross for leading the defence of a position for five days, despite having been buried by a shell explosion on the first day?
... that according to its founders, Pink Peacock is the only "queer Yiddish anarchist vegan pay-what-you-can cafe" in the world?
... that Chicago's Kasama is the world's first Filipino restaurant to be awarded a Michelin star?
... that Michaela Foster, a New Zealand footballer playing in the 2023 World Cup, is known for her mana?
... that the first line to STU48's "Hana wa Dare no Mono?", which imagines a world without borders, is often misheard as wishing for a world without Tokyo?
... that the chicken turtle is one of the shortest-lived turtle species in the world?

Countries of the world - show another

Eswatini (/ˌɛswɑːˈtiːni/ ESS-wah-TEE-nee; Swazi: eSwatini [ɛswáˈtʼiːni]), officially the Kingdom of Eswatini and also known by its former official name Swaziland (/ˈswɑːzilænd/ SWAH-zee-land) and formerly the Kingdom of Swaziland, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. It is bordered by Mozambique to its northeast and South Africa to its north, west, south, and southeast. At no more than 200 km (120 mi) north to south and 130 km (81 mi) east to west, Eswatini is one of the smallest countries in Africa; despite this, its climate and topography are diverse, ranging from a cool and mountainous highveld to a hot and dry lowveld.

The population is composed primarily of ethnic Swazis. The prevalent language is Swazi (siSwati in native form). The Swazis established their kingdom in the mid-18th century under the leadership of Ngwane III. The country and the Swazi take their names from Mswati II, the 19th-century king under whose rule the country was expanded and unified; its boundaries were drawn up in 1881 in the midst of the Scramble for Africa. After the Second Boer War, the kingdom, under the name of Swaziland, was a British high commission territory from 1903 until it regained its full independence on 6 September 1968. In April 2018, the official name was changed from Kingdom of Swaziland to Kingdom of Eswatini, mirroring the name commonly used in Swazi. (Full article...)

List of countries

See also: List of sovereign states

Wonders of the World - show another

The Seven Wonders of Poland (Polish: Siedem cudów Polski) is a short list of cultural wonders located in Poland. The creation of the list was initiated by the leading Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita in a country-wide plebiscite held in September 2007. The results were published in the following month. (Full article...)

List of articles
Wonders of the World Seven Wonders of the Ancient World New7Wonders of the World Seven Wonders of Canada Seven Wonders of Colombia Seven Wonders of Portugal Seven Wonders of Romania Seven Wonders of Russia Seven Wonders of Ukraine Seven Wonders of Wales Seven Wonders of the Industrial World Seven Wonders of Portuguese Origin in the World 12 Treasures of Spain Eighth Wonder of the World