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When I was a child, my family owned three encyclopedias. I used to spend hours upon hours paging through the volumes. Nobody else really bothered with them, so they were essentially mine, all mine.
Wikipedia gives me a similar experience, only better, because they have articles on things that would never have made it into one of my childhood encyclopedias. Where the hardback books might have an entry on The Lord of the Rings, Wikipedia has several articles about the books, the movies, the author, the radio series (what?!), antimodernism, links to parodies and satire, etc., etc.
I've set up a javascript bookmark in Safari on my bookmarks bar. This little snippet of javascript throws up a prompt for search terms, then submits that to a google search limited to wikipedia. I have the bookmark in first place on the bar, so all I have to do to look something up is press command-1, type in the terms and press return. Boom — there's a listing of what Wikipedia offers. (7,920 references to The Lord of the Rings, by the way.)
I read Wikipedia for fun, just like I read those childhood encyclopedias. Whenever something intrigues me, I'll open up a window and see what's there.
Wikipedia gives me a similar experience, only better, because they have articles on things that would never have made it into one of my childhood encyclopedias. Where the hardback books might have an entry on The Lord of the Rings, Wikipedia has several articles about the books, the movies, the author, the radio series (what?!), antimodernism, links to parodies and satire, etc., etc.
I've set up a javascript bookmark in Safari on my bookmarks bar. This little snippet of javascript throws up a prompt for search terms, then submits that to a google search limited to wikipedia. I have the bookmark in first place on the bar, so all I have to do to look something up is press command-1, type in the terms and press return. Boom — there's a listing of what Wikipedia offers. (7,920 references to The Lord of the Rings, by the way.)
I read Wikipedia for fun, just like I read those childhood encyclopedias. Whenever something intrigues me, I'll open up a window and see what's there.
