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Key Point:The MiG-27 had a nasty habbit of exploding.

The Indian air force plans in December 2019 finally to retire its last few Soviet-designed MiG-27 Flogger fighter-bombers, bringing to an end 38 years of MiG-27 operations in India and leaving the Kazakh air force as the last operator of the 1970s-vintage, swing-wing warplane.

New Delhis last MiG-27 unit, No. 29 Squadron is based in Jodhpur in Rajasthan. Two other MiG-27 squadrons shuttered in 2016.

Pilots and planners probably wont miss the speedy but volatile MiG-27, a ground-attack derivative of the MiG-23 interceptor. U.S. Air Force test pilots who flew a captured MiG-23 under the auspices of the once-secret Constant Peg program, literally were afraid of the plane owing to its tendency to explode in mid-flight.

"It would accelerate until it blew up," John Manclark, a commander of Constant Peg during the mid-1980s, said of the MiG-23. "The limit was 720 to 710 knots, but guys would look down inside and see they were going 850 to 880."

The Indian air force acquired the first of 165 locally-assembled MiG-27s starting in 1981. The type flew in combat during the Kargil War between India and Pakistan in 1999. In essence, a simpler MiG-23 without that types air-to-air radar, the MiG-27 with its powerful R-29 engine at low altitude could accelerate to a top speed of around Mach one.

But the plane was complex and unsafe compared to Western types. Even other Soviet types were safer to fly than the MiG-27 was. The Indian air force lost at least 10 percent of its MiG-27s in crashes.

Sri Lankas experience was even worse. The Sri Lankan air force in the late 1990s acquired from Ukraine a batch of six MiG-27s plus a MiG-23 trainer. The Sri Lankan government at the time was at war with the Tamil Tigers rebel group. It wanted a fast fighter-bomber that also could operate at low level.

The MiG-27 arguably was a poor choice. Its unsurprising that Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the countrys wartime defense secretary, later was accused of accepting bribes in exchange for approving the MiG buy. A newspaper editor died in an apparent assassination after reporting on the allegedly corrupt fighter deal.

The initial six MiG-27s, plus a follow-on batch of six Floggers and one trainer that the country bought in 2000, performed poorly in Sri Lankan service, even when flown by experienced Ukrainian mercenary pilots.

U.S. advisors in 2001 assessed the Sri Lankan air forces No. 12 Squadron, which flew the MiG-27s and found it wanting. Air force leaders never bothered to procure the required weapons systems/ammunition for them, The Island reported. On the basis of testimony of both army and [air force] personnel, the U.S. pointed out the failure on the part of No 10 [flying Israeli-made Kfirs] and No. 12 squadrons to destroy targets.

No fewer than four of Sri Lankas 14 MiG-27s and MiG trainers crashed. A Tamil Tiger commando raid destroyed another MiG on the ground. As late as 2017, seven MiGs remained in the Sri Lankan air forces inventory, but none were flightworthy.

The air force in early 2019 finally shut down No. 12 Squadron, formally ending the MiG-27s service in the country and reportedly leaving Sri Lanka with just a handful of operational Kfirs and Chinese-made F-7s.

India is struggling to replace its MiG-27s and other old fighters. New Delhi wants to spend around $18 billion acquiring 110 new fighters to replace MiG-21s and MiG-27s. The new planes would fly alongside European-designed Jaguars, French Mirage 2000s and Rafales, Russian MiG-29s and Su-30s and India's own indigenous Tejas fighter in what American plane-maker Lockheed Martin described as "the worlds largest fighter aircraft ecosystem."

Lockheed is pitching to India a new F-21 version of its iconic F-16 fighter. For the purposes of Lockheed's marketing campaign, the F-21 is a new fighter, although it shares many of its major features with the F-16V the company has sold to Bahrain, Greece, Slovakia, South Korea and Taiwan.

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is theauthor of the graphic novelsWar Fix,War Is BoringandMachete Squad. This piece was originally featured in November 2019 and is being republished due to reader's interest.

Image: Wikipedia

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India is Eliminating its MiG-27 Fighters (They Were a Disaster) - The National Interest Online

Wikipedia is an incredible source, but the correctness of claims posted on its pages is most of the times called into question. To enhance the websites usability and credibility, the Internet Archive is operating to make references simpler to follow by connecting them to books digital copies.

Till now, 50,000 digitized books that are hosted by the Archive have been connected to 130,000 references. To watch an example in action for the new digital referencing, you can go to the Martin Luther King, Jr page on Wikipedia. If you see at the reference for To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference & Martin Luther King Jr (Adam Faircloughs book) at the pages bottom, you will see it is a clickable link. Clicking navigates you to the digital version of the book in the Internet Archive.

When you unlock a digital book provided by the Archive, you can watch a few pages of preview to see the reference data. If you need to read extra, you can lend a digital copy of the book via their initiative (Controlled Digital Lending).

The linking to digital books of references is done both by robots and by users, and has been conducted in the Greek, English, and Arabic editions of Wikipedia. The Internet Archive claims that it aims to carry on working with Wikipedia societies to scan extra books and connect them to references. This is not the first time the 2 websites have collaborated together, as the group earlier assisted to fix 9 Million broken links with the help of its Wayback Machine archive on the encyclopedia.

Together we can attain global access to All Knowledge, claimed Director of the Wayback Machine project, Mark Graham, to the media in an interview. One linked paper, book, news article, web page, video, music file, and image at a time.

Being the Head of the Science Department,MarshaAustinholds the responsibility to carry out all the activities of this department smoothly. While she is active in this mtier from the last 5 years, she has pursued a B.Sc. degree in Astrophysics to nurture her passion for the science domain. Moreover, with her promising managerial capabilities, her contribution to our organization has set a benchmark for other members at Chemical News Reports. Our platform recently completed 5 Years of togetherness withMarsha. Her work adeptness and splendid presentation skills always catch the eyes of the other members of the Chemical News Reports team.

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Wikipedia References Adds Book Previews Hosted By The Internet Archive - Chemical News Reports

Facebook wasnt built in a day.

Neither will WT:Social, the upstart news-focused social network that no-one would ever notice, except that Wikipidia founder Jimmy Wales is behind it. And Wikipedia is a fairly successful project ... its ranked ninth in global internet engagement according to Alexa.

So its getting some attention.

Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images

That attention might be a bit early, however. Im one of the first 200,000 users of the site, and not much is happening yet at WT:Social. Not a lot of news, and not a lot of social.

I already have 53 friends, but Im not sure how they became my friends. And Im following 55 people (again, not quite sure how that happened).

Updating my account header photo took three tries, and the second time it become some random persons me-with-my-muscle-car pic. My feed includes 10 Strange Ways To Get Locked Up In The USA and Fighting Misinformation/Fake News: A Historical Perspective.

So yes, its a little weird right now.

One friend, analyst and thought leader Jeremiah Owyang, bought a paid membership for $12.99 to skip the WT:Social waiting line. (WT:Social will not have paid ads, but will rely on donations and subscriptions, like Wikipedia, in an attempt to avoid the issues that Facebook has platformized (fake news, paid fake ads, and election engineering).

Another friend skipped the waiting list instantly without paying, while one sat in the list for three days. Personally, I was offered the opportunity to contribute yesterday, declined, was put in a waiting list, and then magically today made it in.

Perhaps not shockingly, WT:Social looks very much like a wiki.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' new social network

Theres a list of subwikis (think Groups in Facebook) to join, a place to post something, a social/news feed, a list of wikis you decide to follow upon joining. Oh, and a widget to invite more people.

I cant say its visually appealing, and not all functionality works.

Its buggy ... I tried to create a new group and it 404d pretty hard.

More than anything else, it feels like a socialized news network kind of a low-volume Twitter which makes sense, given Wales focus on news.

WikiTribune becomes a social network for people like you who still have faith in the truth. We are here to create better connections and develop productive discussions around everything that is happening in the world and is important to us.

Its interesting to establish a social network with a similar ethos as Wikipedia, but theres a lot of work to be done. Theres not much news available yet, and theres not much social happening. Theres no obvious private messaging capability, and the interface is designed pretty much to share links first.

Theres also the somewhat confusing opportunity, familiar to those of us who are Wikipedia editors, to add an edit summary or to briefly describe your changes to your social updates.

Sill, theres potential here.

Wikipedia grew from a dream to an experiment to a global phenomenon. If Jimmy Wales can repeat the trick, we might get some real competition in social media. Dont hold your breath waiting for your parents to join, however. WT:Social will likely never be that kind of social network.

If you want to join me in this experiment, here I am on WT:Social.

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Wikipedia Founders Facebook Competitor Is Basic And Buggy (But Interesting) - Forbes

The logo of the Wikipedia free online encyclopedia on a smartphone. (Photo by Kirill KukhmarTASS ... [+] via Getty Images)

Vladimir Putins suggestion that Wikipedia be replaced with a Russian version seems like a patriotic attempt to promote Russian scholarship. It also offers a reminder of the way that limited access to information has historically contributed to tension between Russia and the U.S.

Speaking to the Russian Language Council at a Kremlin meeting November 5, Putin said of Wikipedia, It would be better to replace it with the Big Russian New Encyclopaedia in electronic form, Ria Novosti reported. This will in any case be reliable information in a good contemporary form.

The key words are replace and reliable.

Replace suggests that the new electronic version of the Big Russian Encyclopaedia will be designed to be consulted instead of Wikipedia, not as well as.

Kremlin plans to cut Russia off from the internet

Reliable seems innocuous enough. Isnt that what reference books and websites are supposed to be? But when you pause to think about recent Russian legislation allowing the country to be cut off from the internet (for defensive purposes, in an emergency, according to the Kremlin), critics may start to wonder if that could mean promoting a single, government-friendly, interpretation of events.

The Russian Wikipedia started in 2001, according to the online encyclopaedias own page. Wikipedia, referring to Alexa Internet rankings, says that its Russian version has tended to be the most visited after its English site.

The Russian plans for a replacement are not completely new. Ria Novosti pointed out that in September 1.7 billion roubles ($26.7 million) had been budgeted for Russias answer to the worlds biggest online encyclopaedia. The project is to have the support of the editors of the Big Russian Encyclopaedia, which already has its own website.

YEKATERINBURG, RUSSIA - NOVEMBER 6, 2019: Volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia at Belinsky ... [+] Svedlovsk Regional Universal Library of Science. (Photo by Donat SorokinTASS via Getty Images)

For most of the twentieth century, the Big Soviet Encyclopaedia was the last word in Marxist-Leninist interpretation of world events, science, and history. The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant a new name was needed.

The Big Russian Encyclopaedias site has a link to a copy of the 2002 decree authorizing the work to go ahead. It is signed by Russias then president: Vladimir Putin.

Competition for information

Whatever form the proposed replacement for Russian Wikipedia takes, it will have to compete with other information sources.

Perhaps there is a pattern here. In the last decade, the Russian government did not like some of the international media coverage it was receiving. It created Russia Today, now shortened to RT, to acquaint international audiences with a Russian viewpoint on major global events.

In Soviet times, editors in Moscow would sometimes alter definitions in dictionaries produced in the west, especially definitions of sensitive words like socialism or capitalism.

Today, provided they have the internet, users can look elsewhere for alternative answers.

That was not always possible, but it is important that, for the sake of international understanding, it remains so.

A forgotten story of American-Soviet cooperation

A new book, The Russian Job, by Douglas Smith, shows why. It tells the story of a massive American effort in the 1920s to alleviate famine in the Soviet Union. Countless lives were saved. This kind of cooperation was not to last as the century wore on. Instead, the episode has largely been forgottensomething Smith's book aims to correct.

As a review in The Economist noted, the American Relief Administration was subsequently accused in the Soviet Union of spying and wrecking activities" and of "supporting counter-revolutionary elements. That kind of interpretation was both created by, and contributed to, Cold War tensions between Washington and Moscow.

Whose phrase? The Big Soviet Encyclopaedias.

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Russian Plans To Replace Wikipedia: Echoes Of Russia And Americas Troubled History - Forbes

A casual Wikipedia search of male and female artists will reveal a striking visual disparity. Articles on female artists, when compared to their male counterparts, tend to be shorter, lacking references and often missing photos of the actual artist or their work. This difference is concerning considering Wikipedia is one of the most popular public online encyclopedias, with roughly 40 million registered users worldwide.

Specifically in the Pacific Northwest, artists identifying as female are severely underrepresented both in the actual existence of Wikipedia pages and in the overall quality of the pages themselves.

It was this inequity that brought volunteers to the Jacob Lawrence Gallery this Saturday to participate in a Wikipedia edit-a-thon.

The event was sponsored by the online movement Art + Feminism, a worldwide organization that works to create change in male-dominated topics by holding Wikipedia-edit-a-thons, or events that teach women the technical skills needed to edit and improve Wikipedia articles. Currently, it is estimated that only about 10% of editors are female.

The edit-a-thon was advertised as a way to highlight female-identifying artists; however, there is a lot of overlap with ethnic and LGBTQIA+ minorities.

Wikipedia is not edited equally across the board there's underrepresentation in groups, Genevieve Hulley, the Wikipedia fellow for the gallery, said. We are trying to diversify and add to these underrepresented groups.

Many of the volunteers were not experienced with Wikipedia editing, but were instead passionate about ensuring that women artists in the Pacific Northwest were getting a fair chance at representation.

We all have to support each other, it doesn't work if we don't support each others work, Lynette Charters, a first-time volunteer and Pacific Northwest painter herself, said. As women, if we all have a higher profile, we all benefit.

Emily Zimmerman, director of the Jake and the organizer for the event, was inspired by the lack of representation, specifically among artists who were being showcased at the gallery. An Art + Feminism edit-a-thon provided a way to alleviate this inequity.

We want to address omissions in history as a form of social justice activism, Zimmerman said.

The event concluded with 66 new references added, 17 articles edited, and seven new ones created, including one pending on UW photomedia professor Rebecca Cummins. Cummins is a prominent professional artist in the Northwest with installations all over the state, including public works for the Washington State Arts Commission and Seattle Public Utilities.

Despite her significant role in the Pacific Northwest art scene, an internet search of her name will reveal only a small mention on another male artists Wikipedia page. Events like the one on Saturday are put on to lift deserving artists like Cummins to the same level as their male counterparts and create equity in online information.

For those interested in participating, the gallery plans to host more edit-a-thons in both winter and spring quarters.

Reach contributing writer Sidney Spencer-Mylet at development@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @thisissidneyyy

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Re-editing Wikipedia in the name of Pacific Northwest womxn - Dailyuw