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A Who's Who (or Who Is Who) is a reference work consisting of biographical entries of notable people in a particular field. [1] [2] [3] The oldest and best-known is the annual publication Who's Who , a reference work on contemporary prominent people in Britain published annually since 1849.
Some Who's Who books have a title in the language of the country concerned:
The title "Who's Who" is in the public domain, and thousands of Who's Who compilations of varying scope and quality (and similar publications without the words "Who's Who") have been published by various authors and publishers. Some publications have been described as scams; they list any people likely to buy the book, or to pay for inclusion, with no criterion of genuine notability. [8] They may offer vanity awards [9] or expensive trophies. [10]
One example is the defunct Who's Who Among American High School Students , which was criticized for questionable nomination practices, as well as whether the listing's entries are fact-checked and accurate. [11] [12] According to Steve Bjork, an admissions vice president of Hamline University: "It's honestly something that an admissions officer typically wouldn't consider or wouldn't play into an admissions decision." He suggested that Who's Who was "just trying to sell books". [12]
Who's Who publications are not all of questionable value, but publishers that select truly notable people and provide trustworthy information on them are hard to identify. A & C Black's Who's Who is the canonical example of a legitimate Who's Who reference work, being the first to use the name and establish the approach in print, publishing annually since 1849. However, the longevity of a publication is not in itself a guarantee. In 1999, Tucker Carlson said in Forbes magazine that Marquis Who's Who, founded in 1898 but no longer an independent company, had adopted practices of address harvesting as a revenue stream, undermining its claim to legitimacy as a reference work listing people of merit. [13] [ obsolete source ] A 2005 New York Times article observed that the entries in Marquis Who's Who were "not uniformly fact-checked". [14]
A vanity press or vanity publisher, sometimes also subsidy publisher, is a book printer that is paid by authors to self-publish their books. A vanity press charges fees in advance and does not contribute to the development of the book. It has been described as a scam, though, as the book does get printed, it does not necessarily rise to the level of fraud. The term vanity press is derogatory, so it is not used by the printers. Some self-publishing businesses prefer to market themselves as an independent press, and some authors who are self-publishing through CreateSpace and Amazon Kindle prefer to market themselves as indie authors instead of as self-publishing authors.
Music of Lithuania refers to all forms of music associated with Lithuania, which has a long history of the folk, popular and classical musical development. Music was an important part of polytheistic, pre-Christian Lithuania – rituals were accompanied by music instruments and singing, deeds of the heroes and those who didn't return from the war were celebrated in songs.
Alytus is a city with municipal rights in southern Lithuania. It is the capital of Alytus County. The population as of July 2024 was 50,996. Alytus is the historical centre of the Dzūkija region. The city lies on the banks of the Nemunas river. The major roads linking Vilnius, Kaunas, Lazdijai, and Grodno in Belarus pass through Alytus.
Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania – Christian Families Alliance or EAPL–CFA is a political party in Lithuania. It positions itself as Christian-democratic. It has 3 seats in the Seimas, 1 seat in the European Parliament and 57 seats in municipal councils after the 2023 local election.
Who's Who Among American High School Students was a Who's Who-style web site and publication owned and managed by Educational Communications Inc. that listed what it claimed were high school students "who have excelled in academics, extracurricular activities and community service." The website shut down in November 2007 due to the bankruptcy of its parent firm.
Darius Mockus is a Lithuanian entrepreneur who is owner and President of business group MG grupė, UAB which is one of the largest groups in Lithuania, involved in production, sales, real estate, construction, IT and mass media industries.
The American Biographical Institute (ABI) was a paid-inclusion vanity award publisher based in Raleigh, North Carolina which had been publishing biographical reference directories since 1967. It generated revenue from sales of valueless certificates and books to those listed. Each year the company awarded hundreds of "Man of the Year" or "Woman of the Year" awards at between $195 and $295 each.
The International Biographical Centre was a publisher owned by Melrose Press Ltd that specializes in producing biographical publications, such as the Dictionary of International Biography, Great Men and Women of Science and other vanity awards. It is situated in Ely, Cambridgeshire in the United Kingdom.
Marquis Who's Who, also known as A.N. Marquis Company, is an American publisher of a number of directories containing short biographies. The books usually are entitled Who's Who in... followed by some subject, such as Who's Who in America, Who's Who of American Women, Who's Who in Asia, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, Who's Who in American Politics, etc. Often, Marquis Who's Who books are found in the reference section of local libraries, at corporate libraries, and are also used for research by universities.
Who's Who of Southern Africa is the name of an annual print publication distributed in Southern Africa, containing biographical information about prominent professionals in the Southern African region. According to the website, Southern Africa consists of South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique. The book has been a source of information regarding noteworthy people in Southern Africa for over 100 years.
The "double genocide theory" claims that two genocides of equal severity occurred during World War II: it alleges that the Soviet Union committed atrocities against Eastern Europeans that were equivalent in scale and nature to the Holocaust, in which approximately six million Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany. The theory first gained popularity in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, particularly with regard to discussions about the Holocaust in Lithuania. A more extreme version of the theory is antisemitic and vindicates the actions of Nazi collaborators as retaliatory by accusing Jews of complicity in Soviet repression, especially in Lithuania, eastern Poland, and northern Romania. Scholars have criticized the double genocide theory as a form of Holocaust trivialization.
A vanity award is an award in which the recipient purchases the award and/or marketing services to give the false appearance of a legitimate honor. Pitches for Who's Who-type publications, biographies or nominations for awards or special memberships can have a catch to them in which the honoree is required to pay for recognition.
Romanas Januškevičius is a Lithuanian mathematician who worked in probability theory and characterization of probability distributions and its stability. He was a professor at the Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences, head of the Department of Mathematics, Informatics and Physics since 2001 until 2017.
Cannabis in Lithuania is criminalized for both recreational and medical use. Lithuania criminalized cannabis in 2017 and is the only country in the world that criminalized cannabis in the 21st century. Until 2013 Lithuania was the only country in the European Union where the cultivation of industrial hemp was banned.
Michał Olszewski was a Lithuanian Roman Catholic priest and a member of the Canons Regular of the Penitence of the Blessed Martyrs from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1753, he published a Lithuanian language collection of religious readings Broma atwerta ing wiecznastį... which became very popular and over the next hundred years was reprinted at least sixteen more times. Despite its popularity, Broma was criticized both for its naive content and impure language full of loanwords and barbarisms.
The COVID-19 pandemic in Lithuania was a part of the ongoing worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. The virus was confirmed to have reached Lithuania in February 2020. On 18 March 2020, the first domestic case was confirmed, the first infected being an immediate family member of a known case. The first cases of community spread were found in the country on 19 March and the first related death occurred on 20 March 2020.
Gintarė Skaistė (née Šimonytė) is a Lithuanian politician, Member of the Seimas for Panemunė constituency.
Józefat Ignacy Łukaszewicz was a Polish-Lithuanian painter.
Litvinism is a pseudohistorical branch of nationalism, philosophy and political current in Belarus, which bases the history of its state on the heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and emphasizes the Baltic component of the Belarusian ethnic group. According to this branch of Belarusian nationalism, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a Slavic or Belarusian state, the medieval Lithuanians were Belarusians, and modern Lithuania is a consequence of a falsification of history. On the other hand, some Russian Litvinists refer to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a Slavic Russian state.
The Statesmen, or Statesmen Clan is a conspiracy theory which claims that a deep state of unelected officials, based in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Security Department of Lithuania (VSD), seeks to influence the actions of elected officials, protect each other in power and take control of Lithuania. The conspiracy theory emerged in 2006, after the death of VSD officer Vytautas Pociūnas in Belarus, who the theory claims was a whistleblower of the clan's activities. The conspiracy theory was promoted by politicians in the Homeland Union (TS-LKD).
Who's Who in America ... appears to contain a lot of relatively unaccomplished people who simply nominated themselves. To make the process of self-promotion easier, Reed Elsevier, the publication's parent company and the owner of Lexis-Nexis, now has a site on the Internet where would-be biographees can complete a 'biographical data form.'
