i love wikipedia!!

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anyone else love researching their special interests on wikipedia? it's such an useful site, because it's pretty much credible, has a page for everything imaginable and every page has links to other related topics... i can spend hours digging through it. which brings up the awkward situation of when someone else comes along and asks what i've been doing, staring intensely at the screen for two hours now... "uhhh... i've been browsing wikipedia" like who sane spends their free time doing that?

i want to shake the hands of the people running wikipedia, i'm so grateful. i love learning and whenever i get fixated on something, like a historical event, learning about diseases, an artist or writing a story (which i need info for), it's been there for me.
nonfiction books can be kinda tasking... they're like a long-term investment of my brainpower. wikipedia gets straight to the point, and hands you related info and the definitions of strange words on a platter. they should hire me to market them lol

It's not always accurate or reliable. Anyone can post anything. Use it for a quick and dirty understanding of something but never as a primary resource. I've read some very dubious and/or quite entertaining wikipedia entries.

I can spend hours and hours wikisurfing on the most bizzare topics!

But before Wikipedia was created, as a teen, I used to come back from school, sit in an armchair, grab my parents' 4-volume encyclopedia and read a few random articles just to relax.
And Wikipedia is even better

I enjoy it too, I go on it all the time. Sometimes I learn some really fascinating things.

For example, just last night I was up very late (as usual) reading and learning about the tragic life story of a comedian from the early 1900's named Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. He weighed 13 pounds at birth, but his parents were both of thin build, which made his father think he wasn't his biological son. So he named him Roscoe after a New York politician, whom he really hated. Roscoe had a pretty good career as a singer and an actor in silent comedy films, and in spite of his large size and weight he was very agile and do cartwheels and dance really well. But then he was accused of raping an actress during a party and then accidentally causing her death. She actually had a severe bladder infection, and alcohol, which she drank a lot, would give her severe physical pain. I think that, combined with an alcohol overdose and being given morphine to top it all off is what really killed her, and Roscoe was pronounced not guilty after three trials that were very sensationalized by the media of that time. But it ended up ruining his career and pretty much his life. He died of a heart attack when we was only 46.

I can almost hear other people reading his name and saying "Omg lolololol is this guy related to Jon Arbuckle?" And I'm telling them, "No, genius. Jim Davis didn't even get the idea for Jon's last name from Roscoe Arbuckle. He claims that the name Jon Arbuckle was from an old coffee ad."

I spent a lot of time researching tennis players and marathon runners on Wikipedia. I went through the entire series of Olympic Games from Athens, 1896 to Rio de Janeiro, 2016.

I love reading wikipedia and hopping from article to article learning stuff.

wow it's nice to hear that others share my pastime lol

I became a fan of Denis Istomin after researching his story on Wikipedia. He was in a serious car accident at age 14 and faced two years of rehabilitation. Doctors said he would never play tennis again, but he proved them wrong.

I spend a bit of time on Wiki sometimes. I mostly look up bands/singers I like so I can know what their discography is so I can look for all their stuff online. & I also look up various disorders/illnesses, medications, & other various treatments.