Do you ever go on a Wikipedia knowledge binge?

Sometimes when I can’t sleep, yes. I am now an expert on hydrogen bombs and oil drilling in the nineteenth century.

Yes. Right now i am reading about the entire Kennedy legacy.

This is so fun. I recently learned all about the Ides of March, Alice Roosevelt, and heroin. Yay!

I’ve squandered untold hours of my precious youth filling my head with knowledge from Wikipedia that I will never use. If you want to go on a power binge, try using a new Wikipedia search engine from Powerset.

yeah, I do that a lot.

I know everything about Chernobyl.

@reed

You have just. ruined. my. life.

Not just Wikipedia, but search engines in general are dangerous time-sucking inventions as well as serving a dual purpose of getting me to the information which I may have originally sought.

@andrew – Sorry man, you can join me in Wikipedia rehab.

I’m actually glad to see there are others who do this. Being a history major and very curious person I love the fact that all this STUFF is out there for us to grasp. I start thinking about the tremendous possibilities for the future if we have this much information at our fingertips (and so on and so forth). It’s too bad so much of the internet is bad music, bad home-made videos, and porn.

I havent been on wikipedia in forever, just out of habit from not being able to use it as a source for school. I like searching different databases, and search engines though… Just never wikipedia.

my only experience with this time when I wondered what the Canadian constitution said about civil unions and ended up with enough knowledge of the Canadian government to run for office (ay).

@reed- =O Woooooooooooow! I know what I’ll be doing for the next couple of weeks!

Maybe I’m missing something, but why is that search thing superior to wikipedia’s own search ability?

My senior year of college I had horrible insomnia that often kept me up late enough to make it to my 8:30am seminar. I would spend hours mining through Wikipedia. Sometimes I thought if it was more boring I’d have better luck falling asleep. The really bad nights were the ones when I would start compulsively editing pages and pubmeding for citations.

@monsoon-You can just go there and start looking for things you want to learn about. No thinking of a topic, necessary.

I love it when I find factual errors to correct – how sad is that?

The Problem with Wikipedia