The Wikipedia Corollary

Due to our using Wikipedia for a borderline unprofessional level of internet research, we’ve identified a near phenomenon we call The Wikipedia Corollary. It’s pretty simple, really – you search something in Wikipedia that’s actually pertinent to your task at hand and, before you know it, you’re reading about obscure medieval sacrifice rituals or the best way to cook goat cheese pizza, and at no point did you ever leave the Wikipedia network. With their insanely cross-referenced articles and almost overwhelming breadth of entries, it’s nearly impossible not to click on a link that is only moderately involved with what you set out to learn about, from there following god-knows-what until you’re sufficiently informed about something – just not about what you had logged on to read about in the first place. It seems to be quite a frequent occurrence for anyone who uses Wikipedia with any regularity. In the Sidekick office, for example, it’s not at all uncommon to hear something to the effect of, “Yeah, I had a pretty productive morning, but then I got lost in the Wikipedia Corollary for a couple of hours this afternoon.”

We decided that for this issue we would systematize the Wikipedia Corollary a little bit and see where it takes us. The idea is that the two driving forces behind the Sidekick – Production Manager Andy Rowse and Managing Editor Brian Clark – would both start on the Spokane, WA entry and follow a link of their choice from that page, and again on the next, etc. etc. for 30 days. Reading about one new topic a day for a month, we thought it would be interesting where this sort of arbitrary study would take us and whether our paths would ever cross. Check it out for yourself; the results are found below: (It should be noted that we stole this idea from a couple dudes whose website can be found at http://alertedeye.wordpress.com/the-great-wikipedia-experiment/. They had the goal of visiting one new page a day for an entire year, but apparently one of them got bored in mid-March and the other crapped out shortly before the 4th of July. Slackers.)