# What was the subject of your last Wiki walk? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [March 20, 2012, 9:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-subject-of-your-last-wiki-walk/616296 "2012-03-20T09:47:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2012, 9:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-subject-of-your-last-wiki-walk/616296/1 "2012-03-20T09:47:00Z")
While responding to [this thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=14883295) last night, I went to the Wikipedia link on Mt. Everest in order to do some fact-checking. Before long, I found myself opening tab after tab about Mt. Everest and the people who have died there. What followed was what TVTropes calls a [Wiki Walk](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WikiWalk) - the state wherein one spends hours reading through dozens of tabs of tangentially-related material, with each tab having the potential to provide several more pages the reader finds interesting. I went to bed after about 4 hours of that and woke up in mid-afternoon. It being my day off from work, I proceeded to pick up where i’d left off. While reading a thread on another forum about the dead of Everest, I noticed a poster whose sig line was a quote attributed to “[Captain Moroni](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Moroni)”. Not being familiar with the name I had to look that up on Wikipedia as well - which led to me spending the rest of my day and evening, up until now, reading up on Mormon mythology and Mormonism in general. When was the last time you found yourself spending hours trawling Wikis on this sort of quest for knowledge? ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 7:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-subject-of-your-last-wiki-walk/616296/2 "2012-03-22T07:35:34Z")
Mot of my Wikipedia experiences these days are on the _supply_ rather than consumption side. I have 78 pages on my Watchlist, and am constantly tweaking pages, adding references, etc. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 8:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-subject-of-your-last-wiki-walk/616296/3 "2012-03-22T08:39:18Z")
I went from reading about French Open tennis to Aphrodite. I have no idea how. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-subject-of-your-last-wiki-walk/616296/4 "2012-03-22T16:21:12Z")
I started by looking at gold mining/extraction and ended up reading links on the prevalence of homicide in old west towns. ---
**Author:** ![engineer\_comp\_geek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/engineer_comp_geek/32/504_2.png) [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-subject-of-your-last-wiki-walk/616296/5 "2012-03-22T16:59:38Z")
I very rarely go on a wiki walk. The only time I spend significant amounts of time on wiki is when I am writing articles. The last one I wrote was this: > **[Confederate revolving cannon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Revolving_Cannon)** > > The Confederate revolving cannon was a weapon developed and used during the U.S. Civil War. The weapon had a design similar to that of a revolver pistol, scaled up to the size of a cannon. > Henry Clay Pate was a former attorney who, during the U.S. Civil War, organized a mounted company that was called Pate's Rangers or the Petersburg Rangers. The innovative Pate designed the revolving cannon, which he had cast at the Petersburg foundry in Petersburg, Virginia. This cannon was then made availab... Other than that, I think the last time I actually went to wiki was yesterday when I quickly looked up something about eye color just to refresh my memory (inspired by the thread on UV turning your eyes blue). It was a quick one page read and then done, no wiki walking. I will google walk, which will often lead me to wiki pages, much more often than I wiki walk. ---
**Author:** ![Rachellelogram](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rachellelogram/32/8689_2.png) [@Rachellelogram](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rachellelogram)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-subject-of-your-last-wiki-walk/616296/6 "2012-03-22T19:30:31Z")
The last time I took a wiki walk, I started with the Lizzie Borden murder trial. ---
**Author:** ![Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/qadgop_the_mercotan/32/83_2.png) [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-subject-of-your-last-wiki-walk/616296/7 "2012-03-22T19:42:09Z")
My browser indicates I recently looked at a wiki article about someone named “Captain Moron”, but I have no idea how that got there. ---
**Author:** ![Eliot\_Ness](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Eliot\_Ness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eliot_Ness)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-subject-of-your-last-wiki-walk/616296/8 "2012-03-22T21:52:35Z")
Just finished reading about “pink slime” which is beef trimmings made lean by separating fat with a centrifuge. The topic branches several ways. ---
**Author:** ![wheresmymind](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/91b2a8/32.png) [@wheresmymind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wheresmymind)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2012, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-subject-of-your-last-wiki-walk/616296/9 "2012-03-23T03:32:09Z")
Started at Mel Ott (a baseball player who pops up frequently in crossword puzzles), ended in Nevis. Stops along the way included a sport called “korfball,” The Hague, and the monarchy of the Netherlands. I sometimes play “6 degrees of Wikipedia” where I think of or ask someone for a topic at random, then attempt to navigate to that page from the home page. For instance, I’ll choose the planet Saturn. Click on “Cold Fusion” under “on this day.” Then it’s He-3–\>Solar System–\>Saturn. I swear I’m not as dorky as this paragraph may indicate!