Browsing Wikipedia

[maniac]

Go on, who else does this - looks up random stuff on Wikipedia, then spend a while clicking through linked articles?

 

Just spent 10 minutes reading about Lucozade because I brought some for the first time in ages, and for some reason I wondered when they stopped selling it in glass bottles like I remember it being in when I was younger. Often find myself reading the most random stuff on there - it's almost become a hobby now

 

Mike.

[kmount]

Used to play a game where you picked a "finishing" topic, and then clicked on a random Wikipedia page and worked your way towards the finishing topic absorbing as you went.

[pete]

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_problem_with_wikipedia.png

[srochford]

Back in the olden days, I used to do just that with a paper encyclopedia. It's so much easier to do it on the internet (and you don't end up getting into trouble because you've dumped a stack of encyclopedias on the living room floor!)

 

The word to describe it is serendipity - see how long you can spend researching that :-)

[adameye]

Used to play a game where you picked a "finishing" topic, and then clicked on a random Wikipedia page and worked your way towards the finishing topic absorbing as you went.

 

we had whole classes in my college doing this, when i was studying for my A+ and Net+ we had days where there would be no work. and the college had only a whitelist with a small amount of sites on and one of which was the mighty wikipedia. got banned in the end because people took it too far and we had students trying to get to things like p*rn*graphy.

[computer_expert]

I did this at one point....

 

....only because it was one of the very few sites that were allowed in a whitelist at one of the places i studied at.

[GrumbleDook]

Back in the olden days, I used to do just that with a paper encyclopedia. It's so much easier to do it on the internet (and you don't end up getting into trouble because you've dumped a stack of encyclopedias on the living room floor!)

 

The word to describe it is serendipity - see how long you can spend researching that :-)

 

no, no, no, no, no .... never use just a single encyclopaedia. Go the the British Library with 3 others, each have a topic (reasonably specific) and do it by finding references to other books ... and then find the book, and go from there.

 

Give yourself 8 hours, all take breaks at the same time and the spend an hour or two in the pub afterwards deciding who has the longest and most diverse range of references. Each item you have researched needs to be summarised in no more than 200 words. Each needs to have the full references to the book, author, article, publishing date and so on. Extra points go to the use of first editions for reference material, dipping into fiction to then connect to another book, and points deducted for dipping into a book twice.

[FN-GM]

I do this myself. At the moment I read about actors

[MatthewL]

I do it most of the time, it's usually why I am online till stupid o'clock, only tend to to it at night though!

[Arthur]

Even Skeletor does it.

 

http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/215535851_hBPpe-L-2.jpg

[tmcd35]

I tend to do this and then very quickly confuse myself...[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_theory_of_relativity]Special relativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] !?!?!

 

 

EDIT: now wikipedia-ing -HeMan