guilty. i was watching the webseries ENA and wanted to look it up on this site, and now some of the tabs i have open are "multi-armed and dangerous", "older than dirt", and "the gadfly". i have no idea where half of them come from and i'm pretty sure some just spawn on their own.
How Do I Pick A Name (or HDIPAN or How Do)
Local Longman
this would be funny if it weren't so true
How Do I Pick A Name (or HDIPAN or How Do)
So, one day I went On a random Wiki Walk. I am still not done.
Turns out, I forgot To specify its length. That`s Why I`m here, briefly.
Edited by littlesalmon
I remember a similar effect gained by flipping through a library's card catalog while looking something up. Not sure it counts here as there's less hyperlinking (although card catalogs do have a number of cards directing you to other parts of the catalog), but it can work the same way. Online library catalogs from this perspective are actually a step back, as they're not so good for serendipity - showing you the things you had no idea you were looking for.
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You might have to explain what a "library's card catalog" was to some of the young'uns here.
Nicholson Baker mentioned in his article (and later, his book) about the use of the library, that the card catalogue could also show which the more popular subjects and books were, because those works' cards would be dirtier and more dog-eared.
I have definitely taken a "Wiki Walk" while using the card catalogue.
I am actually taking a "Wiki Walk" as I type this.
From there to here From here to there Funny things Are everywhere!
I didn't really understand this trope. Does this have any thing to do with hiking, Monty python's "Ministry of Silly Walks" or Transylvannia?
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I guess it's called a Wiki Walk because in a way, you're just aimlessly walking around the wiki, and who knows where you'll end up.
Also, it's probably derived from the term "random walk", referring to repeatedly moving in some random direction from the available choices. Random walks come up a lot in some areas of mathematics, where the "directions" to move along are usually as abstract as a wiki page's hyperlinks.
I call this trope "Bluelinking". It usually goes like this:
1) You encounter a strange and interesting word in real life and look it up on Wikipedia. 2) On reading the article, you encounter more strange and interesting words linked in bright blue. 3) You dutifully click on them in new tabs. 4) On reading the articles (there are now several open in several windows), you encounter more stranger and interesting words in bright blue. 5) You dutifully click on them again in new tabs. 6) And so on and so forth.
Thus even if you originally went to Wikipedia to learn more about pit vipers, after a few hours passing by unnoticed, you'll find yourself immersed in reading about ancient pottery decorations among the Jomon people of prehistoric Japan, the mating habits of springtails, the Boer war, and lactase persistence in human evolution.
Interestingly enough, xkcd also gives a name for this phenomenon, ironically for TV Tropes, instead of Wikipedia. It calls it "tab explosion".
Edited by VeryBadKitteh
The funny thing is, I'm going through one right now. I started at DevelopersForesight.Undertale and ended up at this very page.
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