The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia

It didn't. They just make great homework assignments for junior officers, for the same reason that "Write a plan for defending the United States from a sudden attack by space aliens" does. You can discuss whatever you want in the homework assignment and do it to any level of detail, but if it leaks, national security is not threatened.

Compare that to this: "The Pentagon has produced detailed plans for a nuclear attack on Tehran in response to Iran' bioterrorism, the New York Times has learned." That sort of thing starts wars, and the relevant people don't listen to "Oh for pity's sake, I just wanted Captain McSweeny to get some practice writing out nuclear logistics scenarios. We're not going to actually nuke... hold on a second... I can neither confirm nor deny that we might nuke Tehran in response to a WMD attack."

In 1917 Halifax was devastated when two munitions ships collided causing a 3 Kiloton non-nuclear explosion (another interesting story) which resulted in a lot of eye injuries from flying glass since people looked out through windows at the burning ships when the explosion happened.

Boston sent help and ever since Halifax sends the city a Christmas tree.

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if soldiers from Boston who would certainly have vivid memories of the assistance, were to participate in dropping poison gas on the same people they helped ten or fifteen years later.

"if there was ever a front with Indonesia or China, 10 million redneck Americans will be flown in to help us."

The South Koreans believe this too, as do the Taiwanese, the Japanese, the Poles, the French, the British, the Italians... hell the whole world. And someone comes a long and indignantly asks why Ameria spends more on defense than all other first-world nations combined? It's to make up for their slack!

I'm not sure what that comment was supposed to mean or what feelings it reflects so while it's clear that it was said in a joking manner it's in pretty bad taste.

Of course, articles with more links are likely to spawn more tabs, so this score would be expressed as a fraction of the total links in the article that were followed.

That's just for starters; none of this considers the actual text of the article. Once you throw in semantics...

EDIT: I generally don't follow links to articles on more well-known topics [e.g. places], but that shouldn't penalize the article. So there needs to be a ranking for well-known-ness, and consider the fraction of followed links to articles that are less well-known.

1) Crawl the entire web 2) Assume that a link to a page means it is interesting in some way 3) Compute the link graph 4) Pages that are pointed to the most are the most interesting

(More advanced versions of this algorithm may implement the following steps: 2a): Discover spamming, 2b) Work out methods to combat it).

(Actually, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm is probably better because it builds in topic specificity, which allows it to match better match an individuals interests)