Addiction

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 07th December, 2005 @ 21:35

This week, for the second time in as many months, I've found myself utterly glued to Wikipedia.

I find myself looking up a single item on this excellent site and following tens of related threads until several hours of my life have gone past. I don't know if this is symptomatic of some character trait of mine or if it's totally natural.

Most recently, I was watching something on TV and heard a reference to Three Mile Island. Having heard this expression before and knowing nothing about it, I headed to the aforementioned site and looked it up. Very informative. And before I knew it I was studying articles on Chernobyl, Windscale, fission, several nuclear reactor designs, the SCRAM emergency shutdown procedure, Uranium, Sellafield, UNESCO, Manchuria, the end of the second world war, heavy water, Japanese experimentation on humans (Unit 731), saline, bubonic plague, the Ark of the Covenant, Babylon, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Well of Souls. And that's skipping over a few things! I was rather late to bed that evening, and still had a window full of tabs to read in the morning.

A previous search for something mentioned in Never Mind the Buzzcocks made me curious about what the site would have to say about the show itself when I saw an entry in the article I'd looked up. That led me on to Have I Got News for You, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), the BBC (British Broadcasting Company), ITV (from it's creation, including articles on each of the regional companies and everything changed), Sky, BSB, broadcast reforms in 1990 and a whole load of other things.

I think I need to set up a rule in my firewall to only allow a certain number of connections to that site a day, else I might loose what little spare time I have left.