Wikis

From the Guardian article “Common Knowledge”:

“What makes the Wikipedia so compelling - and this article so hard to finish - is the way everything is so massively linked. You read one entry, and before you know it, you're reading up on Anne Boleyn or Italian greyhounds.”

This reminded me of the article we read at the very beginning of the quarter complaining about how the internet allows for such narrow searches that we never explore beyond the specifics of what exactly we are looking for. I remember in class we talked about how wrong he was because no matter what you are looking for on the web, there are always links to distract you. Each link might lead you only to something slightly different from the original page, but over time you can get to topics so far removed from the original topic that you wonder how you ended up there.

After browsing around the wikipedia.com site (for way longer than I could really afford, with all of the other work I’m supposed to be doing), one of the coolest/most addicting things I found was that everything was linked. As the Guardian article talks about, apparently it is really easy to link words as you are writing (making WikiWords). If there’s anything that we don’t need to worry about at all, it is that internet is going to keep us from exploring off-topic subjects. I started browsing by looking at the definition for differential equations and I ended up at the page for a manga published in Japan called Love Hina.

On the one hand, it was kind of neat just to surf around and find things that I didn’t even know I would have looked for. On the other hand, I didn’t read a single article all the way through in the entire time that I was surfing because I always clicked on a WikiWord before I was done with the page I was looking at. Maybe that’s just me and my short attention span, but somehow I think other people have had similar experiences. So it seems like Wikipedias can be an amazing tool for information but also for procrastination and jumbled information. Not that the information on Wikipedia itself is jumbled, it just became jumbled in my brain as each page I started to (but didn’t finish) reading bled into the next.