Look at any wikipedia page for a large city. You will notice on the right, right above the maps and infoboxes with statistical details about population and area and other such things, a spray of photos, a rosette of images, all showing in a spiral what the city looks like. There will be a skyline, a city hall/county courthouse/capitol building, a university, and one or more of the following: a park, museum or historic building. Go look at Salem, Oregon or Dayton, Ohio or Grand Rapids, Michigan for examples of this. I mean, it is true for San Francisco or New York as well, but it also continues down to most of the nation's mid-sized metros. I am actually curious just how small of a city wikipedia will display a city with marble, glass and grass: apparently, Albany, Oregon is not due an entire panorama, and has to make due with a single prosaic picture of a downtown intersection. But perhaps that is just something about Albany.

But if you are wondering

In short, we want your writeups, 300 words or fewer.

"February is the shortest month."
— T. S. Eliot, probably

It's the shortest month of the year! Time for the wee madness that is Brevity Quest. The rules are pretty standard, write something good in 300 words or less.

• The quest starts on Saturday, 1st February at 00:00:00 and ends on Friday the 28th February at 23:59:99 (

In a recent magazine poll, readers established "waka" as the proper pronunciation for the angle-bracket characters < or >. The following poem appeared recently in the magazine.

The text of the poem follows: