Is there a good way of wasting time? Well, kind of. Maybe. Possibly. Let me ramble on for awhile and you decide.

Wikipedia

My friends and I used to have a joke about Wikipedia. You know, as of this year (2023) Wikipedia is 22 years old. Can you believe that? It seems like it can't have been around for that long. As they say, time flies.

When I was in grad school we would have what we called "Wiki Parties." A wikiparty is when you go to Wikipedia to read about something. But then what you do is you find interesting link, interesting link, interesting link, dozens of interesting links. So what do you do? Well, you open all of those in different tabs, of course. You finish reading the article you were on, then you move to the next tab.

Ah, but this isn't just now read through all the tabs and be done. No no no. When you get to the next article in the next tab, you do the same thing all over again. There's another dozen interesting links that go into another dozen tabs. Move on to the next tab and repeat. And so on and so forth.

What ends up happening is three hours later you're still reading Wikipedia and you have more tabs open than ever. You have so many tabs open you can no longer read the title in the tab—so many tabs open that the tabs are so thin even clicking on one is challenging.

That's a wiki party.

^{Help me}

I think at this point in today's world, most of us have gone on at least one wikiparty, probably dozens. It doesn't matter if you are looking up some very academic topic or if you are looking up characters on the TV show Friends, Wikipedia has a way of sucking us all in and sucking away our time as we read article after article.

Is that a productive or good waste of time or just a waste of time? I suppose it depends on if we have something more urgent that we are avoiding doing or not. Going on a wiki party during the work day when you should be working, well that's probably not a good time to go on one. Giving up sleep when you need it is probably also not so good: going on a wiki party when you need to get sleep because you have work the next day. Anything can be bad in excess.

Assuming we have nothing more urgent to do, I can't see that passing the time on Wikipedia is a bad thing. Well, maybe bad for your eyesight. Whats the amount of time eye doctors recommend before you focus on something far away to keep the muscles exercised and keep the risk of nearsightedness low—about 20 minutes? Staring at a screen for hours and reading carefully probably is a bit past that limit. Oh well. We all have glasses and horrible vision these days anyway so maybe that battle is long over.

That aside, I can't see the harm. Any knowledge is good, eh, even if it's knowledge we will likely never use.

Back to that age. Wikipedia has been with us 22 years. Incredible. As of my writing, there are over 6.6 million articles in English. 2.7 million for German, 2.5 million for French, between 1 and 2 million for Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, and Arabic, and thousands or articles in many many many other languages. Wow.

One of my favorite books when I was a child was The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. If you haven't read it, it's a comedy sci-fi book—silly, zany British-style comedy. The Hitchhikers Guide, to which the title refers, is a massive encyclopedia about everything in the universe. So massive that it can only be accessed with an e-reader, a device that was complete fantasy when the book was released (in 1979), but is now in all of our pockets. Wikipedia is the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Less colorful than that guide, but no less useful.

The Wikipedia entry on "towels" is much less amusing than the entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide, but probably more practical. That amazing guide tells us:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Wikipedia, by contrast, just tells us:

A towel is a piece of absorbent cloth or paper used for drying or wiping a surface. Towels draw moisture through direct contact.

In households, several types of towels are used, such as hand towels, bath towels, and kitchen towels.

Paper towels are provided in commercial or office bathrooms via a dispenser for users to dry their hands. They are also used for such duties such as wiping, cleaning, and drying.

Hmmm... I suppose one of these is more factual, but... which one??

I wonder what the future of Wikipedia is. As ChatGPT becomes better and better at directly answering our questions, will traffic to Wikipedia drop? If fewer people visit the site, will they be able to maintain both the number of volunteers and the number of donations used to run the site?

Wikipedia is far from perfect. Some articles show clear bias, while others are so carefully balanced that they read like stereo instructions: dry and boring. For all the flaws, though, I think it is one of the most amazing resources humanity has managed to put together.

Well anyway, no grand conclusion here. This was just me rambling on about Wikipedia and Wikiparties. Now I think I'll schedule this to post and then go on my own wikiparty!

(title graphic made by me in Photoshop from this image by Simone Lugli from Pixabay)

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.