My dumb butt thought it was gonna be a list of every tree in the world, all eight gazillion of them

I did a search, there are an estimated 3 trillion trees in the world; somehow that's much fewer than I expected.

Well there was probably a lot more a few hundred years ago.

It's actually the opposite, I think. Because of how industrialized the lumber/paper industries have gotten, stewardship of forests has improved over time. This includes replanting in harvested areas.

It is actually three treellion.

Even nature likes a terrible pun.

tree trillion

Tree fiddy and change.

This is a map of all trees in the Netherlands

https://boomregister.nl/overzichtskaart-van-de-bomen-in-nede...

I loathe these stupid widgets that show a blank map as soon as you zoom out a little (past the 1000m scale in this case). How can you fail so hard at your only job?

Well, there are a lot of trees. If you want you can interpret grey as green as that’s what you would see zoomed out?

I'm surprised that the Katamari games include a longer list of physical objects than wikipedia.

The list of animals has dolphins and birds but not humans?

Consistent with this definition of ”animal” - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/animal#English:_any_nonhuman_...

It’s Wikipedia. Make the change you want to see in the page.

With respect, that is naive. To demonstrate, create a new account and go ahead and make that change. It will be reverted. Wikipedia is not the democratic free-for-all it once was.

If you do perform that experiment and I am wrong, please come back and let us know.

Wikipedia is and has always been a wiki; reverting bad or controversial edits has always been expected from day one.

Also Wikipedia has developed an editorial line of its own, so it's normal that edits that go against the line will be put in question; if that happens to you, you're expected to collaborate in the talk pages to express your intent for the changes, and possibly get recommendations on how to tweak it so that it sticks.

It also happens that most of contributions by first timers are indistinguishable from vandalism or spam; those are so obvious that an automated bot is able to recognize them and revert them without human supervision, with a very high success rate.

However if those first contributions are genuinely useful to the encyclopedia, such as adding high quality references for an unverified claim, correcting typos, or removing obvious vandalism that slipped through the cracks, it's much more likely that the edits will stay; go ahead and try that experiment and tell us how it went.

> reverting bad or controversial edits has always been expected from day one.

How charming of you to think that the well-meaning contributor is going to happily smile and agree with you when you tell them that their well-meaning contributions are bad.

There are plenty of "bad and controversial edits" on Wikipedia, just some are more acceptable than others. Wikipedia is an oligarchy.

I’m here to let you know you are wrong.

I made an anonymous edit to the Wikipedia page of one of Hemingways short stories three years ago, and my edit is still there.

You were lucky that you could edit in the first place. Most anonymous editors are blocked before they make an edit due to shared IPs.

I was responding to this:

>> The list of animals has dolphins and birds but not humans?

> It’s Wikipedia. Make the change you want to see in the page.

Yes, minor changes will not draw negative attention but the days when randos could make major edits like that are long gone.

But try it. Maybe I'm wrong.

I’ve made several edits to wiki-pages without even having an account. A few got reverted, most stayed.

Some pages/topics are more open to changes than others, that much is true.

"It’s Wikipedia. Make the change you want to see in the page."

If it allows you to edit it in the first place or isn't reverted within five minutes.

Start with the "practice" articles that Wikipedia suggests when you begin as an editor. They might be stub articles, or articles with obvious issues, that you are expected to research and improve a little. Then edit articles where you have more domain expertise than the original authors.

They have strict rules, but I’ve had no issues editing articles after my first error. It’s certainly not like posting an answer on Stack Overflow, where you will be downvoted and flamed for a correct-but-suboptimal answer.

Most of the time when I try to edit anything, I get a message telling me I am blocked. I am never blocked because of anything I have done but because my shared IP is. It is not something "anyone can edit" as they claim.

I do not wish to have a named account, because I had to leave one after an admin started stalking me on it. I never wanted my Wikipedia editing to be about me, but about the content.

I suppose it's a matter of perspective which one you find worse: getting flamed for trying to contribute, or just having your contributions erased.

A different list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_hominids#Humans

The term "animal" refers to non-human creatures.

Not when I use the word. Animals are the big creatures that move around. Guess I'm just a preschooler.

People confuse biological science with language, when they are not the same.

Yes, biologically we are animals (and some people behave like them — joke), but humans have used this term to differentiate us from other creatures.

We are very similar to chimpanzees genetically, and people keep bringing this up but we are very different to them in some ways.