Monday, October 01, 2007

Too Successful

For a while now I haven't been spending as much time on Wikipedia as I used to. Back when I was procrastinating on a PhD I would spend a lot of time just reading articles on Wikipedia. Now, not so much.

Sure, part of the reason is I have less free time. But another big contributor is that Wikipedia is almost too successful. Back in the day, I'd just click on the Random Article link, and most of the time something interesting came up. Now, I'm deluged with articles about soccer players from Iceland, census designated locations in America, obscure albums in genres I don't know by artists I don't know, and other things that make me click for the next article instead of reading the one I got.

This overabundance of uninteresting (to me) articles is a by product of Wikipedia's success. As Wikipedia get's more articles, the fraction that are interesting to a given person will tend to go down, and the Random Article link will bring up more and more stuff that's not of interest.

Ah well, nothing stays good forever.

End Post
Writing time: 9 minutes
Time since last post: 15 or so minutes
Current media: iTunes shuffle, currently Fatal by RZA

3 comments:

Hewhoblogs said...

I've been wanting to say this for nine days now.

This is the first time that someone has called the amount of ridiculous nonsense on wikipedia evidence of success.

Esonlinji said...

The articles I'm bitching about aren't the ridiculous nonsense ones, it's all the small, sensible articles that just happens to be completely uninteresting to me.

Anonymous said...

hehehe...look up "Bertand Newton" or "Edward McGuire" on Wiki and see what you get. It won't be what you think, trust me ;);P~

PS When are you due back in Oz?