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How to Waste Time on the Internet, 3rd period
Sunday, July 27th, 2025 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
intheeyeofthebeholding"Some time-wasting things are more informative than others," Jon said once everyone had settled. "Though occasionally veracity is...well, best proved by actual research."
He held up his phone, which was opened to Wikipedia. "Wikipedia is more or less an encyclopedia, but crowd-sourced. Which is to say, anybody can write anything, but they do their best to try and keep it factual. It's generally safe for casual knowledge, but real resource...as I said, best to check.
"One way to use it to waste time, though, is with looking at random pages. They have their own code, or you can use something like Wikiroulette. Just look up a random page, read it, click on links in it to take you to something related, and keep going however you like. When you get bored or run out of links, you can start again."
He went to another page. "There are also a few games you can play with it, like following a specific number link until you run out of links, or seeing how fast you can get from one article to another using links. It's a definite time-waster, and also potentially informative and really interesting."
If you were a nerd.
"So let's do that, and report anything really interesting you find."
He held up his phone, which was opened to Wikipedia. "Wikipedia is more or less an encyclopedia, but crowd-sourced. Which is to say, anybody can write anything, but they do their best to try and keep it factual. It's generally safe for casual knowledge, but real resource...as I said, best to check.
"One way to use it to waste time, though, is with looking at random pages. They have their own code, or you can use something like Wikiroulette. Just look up a random page, read it, click on links in it to take you to something related, and keep going however you like. When you get bored or run out of links, you can start again."
He went to another page. "There are also a few games you can play with it, like following a specific number link until you run out of links, or seeing how fast you can get from one article to another using links. It's a definite time-waster, and also potentially informative and really interesting."
If you were a nerd.
"So let's do that, and report anything really interesting you find."