I wiki, therefore I am

I love wikipedia. To those who know me well, this comes as no surprise. Sometime during the past year, Wikipedia surpassed SportsCenter, Seinfeld, and John Tesh to become my number one source for information.

Terms spawned by Wikipedia have already become part of our daily vernacular. To wiki means to research or look up a topic on Wikipedia. Past tense, wiki'd. Present participle, wikiing. Plural form, wikies or wiki's.

Then, of course, there are other less known terms still waiting to make their way into common dialect. Terms like wikilicious, which is used to describe a fascinating, surprising, or otherwise extraordinary fact unearthed within the pages of Wikipedia.

Example:
"Did you know that Tom Wopat appeared in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross?"
"Wow! That's wikilicious!."

I wiki most everything. Some days I spend indiscriminate amounts of time wikiing just for fun. Like last week, I wiki'd Jordache, you know, hoping for some sign that they may be coming back in style.

Here is what I learned about Jordache: "The brand is known for its designer jeans that were popular in the late 1970s."

Late seventies? I was wearing Jordache jeans in 1986 like they were going out of style! Which apparently, they were.

I'm not sure from whence my Wikipedia fascination comes. Perhaps it stems from the fact that we never had a complete and current set of encyclopedias when I was growing up. Dad's World Books were the 1959 edition.

Then I remember sometime in the 80's, Winn Dixie began selling encyclopedias. Ah yes, could there be a better plan? There's no place like your local supermarket to get your reference materials from.

You could buy a different volume every week or two. So Mom would buy them when she went grocery shopping. Then one week, she forgot, so we missed a volume. Then another. Long story short, in the end I could do a report on any topic as long as it didn't begin with a D, G, J-K, M, S, or W,X,Y,Z.

On top of that, they weren't World Books. Or even Encyclopedia Brittanicas. They were Funk & Wagnalls. Sounds more like a bad 70's band than an encyclopedia.

Or perhaps my fascination with Wikipedia and seemingly useless information is inherited. After all, I remember Dad spending countless hours every day in the bathroom reading his World Books. So in a way, when I'm wikiing, I'm only carrying on a family tradition.

Here's to Dad, the sanctity of a man's bathroom, and those who spend twenty hours a day editing Wikipedia. Oh, and also to John Tesh. You had a good run, but it's over, man.

Happy wikiing!

"My ergonomic keyboard never leaves me bored. Shopping online for deals on some writable media. I edit Wikipedia..."