Wikipedia:Today's featured article

Today's featured article

This star symbolizes the featured content on Wikipedia.
This star symbolizes the featured content on Wikipedia.

Each day, a summary (roughly 975 characters long) of one of Wikipedia's featured articles (FAs) appears at the top of the Main Page as Today's Featured Article (TFA). The Main Page is viewed about 4.7 million times daily.

TFAs are scheduled by the TFA coordinators: Wehwalt, Dank and Gog the Mild. WP:TFAA displays the current month, with easy navigation to other months. If you notice an error in an upcoming TFA summary, please feel free to fix it yourself; if the mistake is in today's or tomorrow's summary, please leave a message at WP:ERRORS so an administrator can fix it. Articles can be nominated for TFA at the TFA requests page, and articles with a date connection within the next year can be suggested at the TFA pending page. Feel free to bring questions and comments to the TFA talk page, and you can ping all the TFA coordinators by adding "{{@TFA}}" in a signed comment on any talk page.

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From today's featured article

Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper (born 1975) is an American actor and filmmaker whose films have grossed $13 billion worldwide. After a guest role in Sex and the City, he made his film debut in the comedy Wet Hot American Summer (2001) and played Will Tippin in the television show Alias (2001–2006). He had his breakthrough in The Hangover (2009), which was followed by two sequels. Cooper found more success with Silver Linings Playbook (2012), American Hustle (2013), and American Sniper (2014), the last of which he also produced. Cooper wrote, produced, directed, and starred in A Star Is Born (2018). For his part in its soundtrack and its chart-topping lead single "Shallow", he won a BAFTA Award and two Grammys. Cooper continued his filmmaking with Joker (2019), Nightmare Alley (2021) and Maestro (2023), and also starred in the last two. He has received twelve Academy Award nominations. (This article is part of a featured topic: Bradley Cooper.)

From tomorrow's featured article

Carl Sagan with a mock-up of a Viking lander
Carl Sagan with a mock-up of a Viking lander

The Sagan standard is the aphorism that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". It is named for Carl Sagan (pictured), who used the phrase in his 1979 book Broca's Brain. The standard has been described as fundamental to the scientific method and is regarded as encapsulating the basic principles of scientific skepticism. The Sagan standard is similar to Occam's razor in that both prefer simpler explanations to more complex ones. The Sagan standard is often invoked to challenge data and scientific findings, or to criticize pseudoscientific claims. Similar statements were previously made by figures such as Thomas Jefferson in 1808, Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814, and Théodore Flournoy in 1899. The formulation "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" was used a year prior to Sagan, by scientific skeptic Marcello Truzzi. It has also been argued that philosopher David Hume first fully characterized the principles of the Sagan standard in his 1748 essay "Of Miracles". (Full article...)

From the day after tomorrow's featured article

Fairfax Harrison

Fairfax Harrison (March 13, 1869 – February 2, 1938) was an American lawyer and businessman. He became a lawyer for the Southern Railway Company in 1896, and by 1906 he was the company's vice-president of finance. In 1913 he was elected president of Southern; under his leadership, the company expanded to an 8,000-mile (13,000 km) network across 13 states. Following the United States's entry into World War I, the federal government took control of the railroads, running them through the United States Railroad Administration, on which Harrison served. After the war, Harrison worked to improve the railroad's public relations, upgrade the locomotive stock by introducing more powerful engines, increase the company's amount of railroad track and extend the area serviced by the railway. Harrison struggled to keep the railroad afloat during the Great Depression, but by 1936 Southern was once again profitable. Harrison retired in 1937 and died three months later. (Full article...)