BEN HYMAN
Gargoyle senior editor
Posted Thursday, May 10, 2007
Opinions

Warning: If you have the tendency to click on every link you see, or are easily caught up in Wikipedia, this is NOT the article for you.

Note: There's no actual dilemma with Wikipedia, except as relates to the human sleep schedule, the number of hours in a day, and the sheer number of pages on Wikipedia. It was a catchy title that made you click the link though, eh?

Despite having an AP exam both this week and next week, I somehow find myself with far more free time than I had, say, a week ago. What does this mean? Why, more time to read, of course!

Even for a Uni student, I'd like to think I'm fairly atypical. To wit, I was reading a book about math. Admittedly it was a satire, and a very good one at that (I quote: “group theory [is] an exceedingly beautiful branch of pure mathematics used for showing how many different ways blocks of wood can be painted. Introduced in advanced calculus courses and often seen on ‘Sesame Street'”). The underlying math concepts that the book made fun of were real, and some of them sounded pretty cool. So …

From the book, of course, it was a logical step to Wikipedia to learn a little bit more about the interesting math bits. What follows is a map of my browsing history.

Quaternions —> Seki Kówa —> James Joseph Sylvester —> Euler's totient function —> Euler's Theorem —> Laplace expansion —> Aitken's delta-squared process.

For those of you more familiarly acquainted with Wikipedia, that list might even seem a bit short.

The truth is, that was hardly my first math-run to Wikipedia. I occasionally find myself there Saturday night around 11:30 (over the summer, guys, come on!), and I know I can despair of ever going to bed at a reasonable hour. Seriously, it takes hours before I finally convince myself that the Gamma function doesn't do me much good if I can't even keep my eyes open.

That's probably because most of that math stuff seems to make the most sense around midnight (the witching hour — a coincidence? I think not). I knew that as I closed that last Wikipedia window on Aitken's delta-squared process (and what I could make sense of it was fairly interesting), I would be back. All roads lead to Wikipedia.

And lo and behold, I came crawling back, less than an hour later. Here's how I got started. Drudge Report is a web site linking to offbeat news and political news with a conservative slant (made famous for breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal). I have no interest in Rosie O'Donnell, but for some reason, I clicked a link from Drudge Report to a story on Salon about her and other current events.

Drudge Report —> A Salon.com story by Camille Paglia —> Camille Paglia (the first Wikipedia page — and here was my downfall) —> The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll —> Loving Female Authority (FOR ENGLISH CLASS, PEOPLE … we're talking about feminism) —> Nihilism —> Rita Mae Brown (name sounded familiar) —> Phyllis Schlafly —> Rostker v. Goldberg —> Paleoconservative —> Thomas Friedman —> Richard Posner —> Learned Hand —> Bernard Lewis —> Fareed Zakaria —> Yusuf al-Qaradawi —> Larry Summers —> Robert Kagan —> Mohammad Khatami —> Obiter dicta —> Islamism —> Clash of Civilizations —> Gunnar Myrdal —> Drew Faust —> Samuel P. Huntington —> Social policy.

Despite my use of the —>, that's not quite a linear list. Most of these I first opened up off of The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll page, but still. You can see how my precious hours are whittled away.

Yesterday it looks like I was on a political science bent, but in the past, I've been on math, science, and history bents. The sad thing is, I enjoy every minute of it. It's a great way to waste hours of time and convince yourself you're doing important things so it's all OK.

I'd be remiss in writing this entry if I didn't link to the XKCD.com comic on Wikipedia.

Some of you might also be interested to know that I edited the social policy article to fix a formatting issue. I've corrected typos on and added information to at least 20 pages, including the all-important page on Uni High. Any Wikipedia stories you guys would like to share?

RELATED

— Where it all begins: Wikipedia

— Gargoyle staff blog entry: The problem with Wikipedia