I am a fellow of strange interests. I’ll be the first to admit it. I really do wish I were more interested in normal things, like baseball or guitars or the TV show “House”. But I’m not–well, not in the real world anyway.Instead, I find myself in cyberspace spending hours reading up on bizarre and outlandish subjects. Today was agrarianism, Jefferson, and the Luddites, then Ronald L. McDonald, the restauranteur. Yesterday was in-depth research on the life story of Henriette Strobel, an erstwhile German disco star. Two days ago it was national high school rankings and how they’re performed. Tomorrow, no doubt, will find me spending countless hours on the Internet seeking out information on something like the history of dictionaries or the biography of Barry Goldwater or the etymology of the word “the”. I can’t seem to stop. It’s an obsession. And I think I know how it all began…

Now, I could venture many diagnoses for this extreme and voracious (and frightening) curiosity, ranging from the psychological to the biological, and I might attribute it, in part, to my moderate OCD. But I suspect that this is a problem that, while perhaps having its origin in my mind, has been duly enabled by one particular culprit, well-known to us all: Wikipedia.

I don’t know exactly when it was that I discovered the Wiki realm, but I’d say it was probably during my junior year of high school. I waded in cautiously (rather than jumping in Mary Katherine Gallagher-style), but soon I was thoroughly, and irrevocably, submersed in its incredible breadth. Google had suddenly become the manual typewriter of the Internet, a terribly strenuous tool requiring me to actually know what I wanted to look up before initiating my search. With Wikipedia, I needed only navigate to its homepage to find some interesting fact whose hyperlinked tags could take me in a million different directions afterward. And take those paths I did. For hours and hours, days and days.

Not much has changed. I have been a Wikiaddict for three years now, and it continues to eat up my hours of free (and not so free) time without any foreseeable end. I’m finally willing to admit that I have a problem–probably because it’s finals, and I’m discovering that my Wiki-ing is, dangerously, taking away from my study time. But if I stop, if I promise to go cold-turkey for the rest of the week, how will I be able to live? What will I do with all my efficiency? And my focus? And all that time?Well, I guess I might just get my paper finished before it’s due, which seems so utterly unnecessary. Then again, I can use the extra time for Wikip…I mean, for packing.

Am I alone? Or are there others with this awful affliction?