There ought to be a good word for the practice, now common at least within a certain demographic, of spending prolonged amounts of time clicking from one Wikipedia entry to the next as curiosity dictates. It would have to work as both a verb and a noun. In terms of the whole internet, a comparable term might be “browsing” or “surfing.
The obsolete version, which I remember from when I was a kid, is going to look up a term in an encyclopedia and spending the afternoon opening various volumes and reading random entries. That was organized more by letter than topic, however, so there was rarely the linear journey you get with Wikipedia.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and the best I’ve come up with is Wikiwandering. It’s awkward to say, so surely there’s something better. Clever neologism, anyone?

1 comment
Comments feed for this article
May 21, 2008 at 9:21 pm
A Wikiwandering adventure « Stories on the run
[...] May 21, 2008, 2:21 pm Filed under: Adventure, Internet Lisa and I have been referring to it as “Wikiwandering.” It’s when you look up something on Wikipedia and wind up [...]