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This is the front page of the Simple English Wikipedia. Wikipedias are places where people work together to write encyclopedias in different languages. We use Simple English words and grammar here. The Simple English Wikipedia is for everyone, such as children and adults who are learning English. There are 286,007 articles on the Simple English Wikipedia. All of the pages are free to use. They have all been published under both the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 4.0 International License and the GNU Free Documentation License. You can help here! You may change these pages and make new pages. Read the help pages and other good pages to learn how to write pages here. If you need help, you may ask questions at Simple talk.

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Selected Very Good Article

Le Spectre de la rose (English: The Spirit of the Rose) is a short ballet. It is about a young girl who dreams of dancing with the spirit of a souvenir rose from her first ball. Jean-Louis Vaudoyer wrote the ballet story. He based it on a verse by Théophile Gautier.

The dances were designed by Michel Fokine. The music was Hector Berlioz's 1841 orchestration of Carl Maria von Weber's piano music Afforderung zum Tanz (English: Invitation to the Dance). Léon Bakst designed the sets and costumes.

The ballet was first presented in Monte Carlo on 19 April 1911. Vaslav Nijinsky danced The Rose and Tamara Karsavina danced The Young Girl. Spectre became internationally famous for the leap (jump) Nijinsky made through a window at the ballet's end. After it was presented, the ballet was described as "immediate success" by writer Grace Robert.

Selected Good Article

The areas of the Shipping Forecast
The areas of the Shipping Forecast

The Shipping Forecast is a weather forecast covering the sea around the United Kingdom and Ireland. It has been broadcast four times a day on BBC Radio 4 since the 1920s. The Met Office, the UK meteorological centre, produces it for the Maritime Coastguard Agency. The forecast talks about lots of places, starting with "Viking" in the northeast and going clockwise around the British coastline until it reaches "Southeast Iceland" in the northwest. Sometimes the names are changed to keep them the same as in other countries.

Did you know...

From a collection of Wikipedia's articles:

Katherine Johnson in 1971

  • ... that Katherine Johnson (pictured) was seen as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist?
  • ... that Phoenix, Arizona is the most populated state capital of the United States?
  • ... that President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when they won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007?
  • ... that the 2023 song "We Didn't Start the Fire", which covers popular events from 1989 to 2023, did not mention the COVID-19 pandemic because it could not rhyme with Bush v. Gore?
  • ... that at age 25, Australian-born British physicist Sir Lawrence Bragg is the youngest person to win a Nobel Prize?
  • ... that people lose more money to romance scams than to other similar types of scam?

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