LA MARATÓ DE TV3, THIRTY YEARS OF GREAT SOLIDARITY

Today, The Grandma and her friends Claire Fontaine, Jordi Santanyí, Josep de Ca'th Lon, Tina Picotes and Tonyi Tamaki want to talk about La Marató de TV3, a Catalan public television program that raises funds for medical research and which has reached its 30th edition, this year dedicated to mental health diseases.

Mental health is a serious issue that affects a very high percentage of our society, while being highly stigmatized. The two main objectives of this Marató are to raise funds to research and raise awareness about the medical issues covered. It is a very significant day for Catalans, because they show one of the pillars of their idiosyncrasy, solidarity. No nation can move forward without solidarity and without a strong sense of community.

During the days leading up to the Marató de TV3, thousands of events are held throughout Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Andorra where anonymous people work together to raise funds which will then be donated to La Marató. Dances, popular culture, bingo, sports events, art exhibitions, concerts ... everything is worth it to be able to come together to make this joint effort a reality: to work together to be able to finance projects that improve everyone's quality of life.

Congratulations on these 30 years of solidarity. Congratulations to the Catalan public television (TV3) and to all the people who participate from the Catalan Countries or from other parts of the world.

More information: La Marató de TV3

La Marató de TV3, or La Marató, is a solidarity gala or telemarathon held annually by TV3 on the Sunday before Christmas and promoted by Televisió de Catalunya and the Fundació La Marató de TV3.

The first edition was held in 1992 and each year funds are raised for research on a type of disease; each year a different type of disease. An average of seven million euros is raised each year.

Its main purpose is to raise funds for research and dissemination of a disease or group of diseases. Over the years, it has grown in prestige and donations to the point of creating in 1996 the Fundació La Marató de TV3, which is responsible for managing the funds, the selection of the best scientific projects for funding and the campaigns of relevant awareness.

To raise money for the fund of the Marató, a thousand events are organized all over the Catalan Countries. Since 2005 it has had the Marató record, which is sold to the main newspapers in Catalonia. Before the start of the 2013 edition, the Marató has allocated more than 119 million euros in 607 years to 607 biomedical research projects.

For the 2020 edition, the Foundation's board of trustees has focused its attention on COVID-19, moving the topic of Mental Illness to the 2021 edition, which will be the 30th edition of the Marató.

More information: Twitter-La Marató

There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective.
There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.

Matt Haig

WIKIPEDIA, THE MULTILINGUAL OPEN-COLLABORATING

Today, The Grandma and her friends Claire Fontaine, Jordi Santanyí, Josep de Ca'thLon, Rennette Watson, Tina Picotes & Tonyi Tamaki want to congratulate Wikipedia for its 20th anniversary.

Wikipedia is a multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopaedia created and maintained by a community of volunteer editors, and it is the first source of this blog, a blog created as a tool to help The Grandma with her classes.

Congratulations to all people who participate in this wonderful project and long live for Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopaedia created and maintained by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system.

It is one of the 15 most popular websites as ranked by Alexa, as of January 2021 and The Economist newspaper placed it as the 13th-most-visited place on the web. Featuring no advertisements, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

Sanger coined its name as a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopaedia. It was initially an English-language encyclopaedia, but versions in other languages were quickly developed. With 6.2 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 300 Wikipedia encyclopaedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 55 million articles, attracting 1.7 billion unique visitors per month.

Wikipedia has been criticized for its uneven accuracy and for exhibiting systemic bias, including gender bias, with the majority of editors being male. Edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women's topics.

In 2006, Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopaedia in the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales. The project's reputation improved further in the 2010s as it increased efforts to improve its quality and reliability, based on its unique structure, curation and absence of commercial bias.

In 2018, Facebook and YouTube announced that they would help users detect fake news by suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles.

Other collaborative online encyclopaedias were attempted before Wikipedia, but none were as successful.

More information: Wikipedia

Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopaedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.

Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but even before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopaedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.

On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a feeder project for Nupedia.

The domains wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org were registered on January 12, 2001, and January 13, 2001, respectively, and Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.

Wikipedia's policy of neutral point-of-view was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia. Originally, Bomis intended to make Wikipedia a business for profit.

There are currently 317 language editions of Wikipedia, also called language versions, or simply Wikipedias. As of January 2021, the six largest, in order of article count, are the English, Cebuano, Swedish, German, French, and Dutch Wikipedias.

In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (Russian, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Waray, Vietnamese, Japanese, Egyptian Arabic, Chinese, Arabic, Ukrainian and Portuguese), seven more have over 500,000 articles (Persian, Catalan, Serbian, Indonesian, Norwegian Bokmål, Korean and Finnish), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000.

More information: Time

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

Clay Shirky