Time-Waster of the Gods

I’ve fallen in love with Wikipedia.

I always liked encyclopedias, the huge mass of knowledge they represented. We had a set of Britannica when I was a kid, and it’s mass dominated the lowest shelves of a bookshelf in my Dad’s study. But the size was a bit daunting, too. It didn’t lend itself to browsing. I’ve spent some good hours glancing through various Almanacs, just flipping back and forth, reading the thumbnail biographies of the American presidents, the lists of Olympians and Nobel Laureates. Often I was stoned, but that wasn’t necessary. It’s just kinda fun.

Wikipedia’s just like an Almanac, in that I can just flip through, using the random article button. Page after page can fly by, showing, at the very least, the amount of information that exists that I don’t give a rat’s ass about. Ganden Monastery. Xie Shengwu. James Budd. James Madison College. Stropping. Collectables Records. Absalom, Absalom! Okay, I’d actually like to know more about that last one, as I’ve heard good things about Faulkner. But next up come the Cleuh, who are a Berber ethnic group. And that entry says almost nothing else about them, which is fine by me.

But there are also the masses of information that I do actually want to know something about. And usually, there’s more information than I really want. And it’s all indexed, so that you can consult other, related subjects, without all that annoying page turning.

So, if I want to spend a couple of hours working my way through a list of British comedians, or the history and tenets of Scientology, there it all is. If I want, as I did a couple of days ago, read about the connections between the band KLF and Discordianism, and follow the links to read about Manichaeism, I can with ease. I can read all about the history of the X-Men, or Warren Ellis’ Planetary, the death of Yukio Mishima, quotes from the sitcom Scrubs, whatever.

The fact that it Wikipedia can be edited by just about anyone doesn’t bother me at all. Most of the people who craft entries seem to keep a pretty close eye on them, to ensure that the entry does reflect the truth, and not truthiness. It leads to some interesting oddities, too. I like the fact that the entry for Lindze Letherman, who plays Georgie Jones on General Hospital, said, at the bottom of the entry, “Lindze Letherman is cool, but complains a lot” the first time I read it, and it doesn’t now.

Why I was reading about actors and characters on General Hospital is beside the point.

Basically, I’m just saying that Wikipedia lets me spend hours reading online, instead of looking for a job or a new place to live, with slightly better odds of the information being on the up and up than most webpages, and with less searching. And I like that.