Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the single greatest creation of our age. This enormous repository of generally pretty accurate and neutral information made freely available to anyone with the ability to access it is the Great Pyramid at Giza for our millenium. This is our Roman road network, our hanging gardens, our forbidden city. It is a creation enormous in scope and unfathomable in the extent of its power for good, and it's also endlessly entertaining.

For as useful as the Roman's roads were, I'm pretty sure nobody thought of them as entertainment at the time. I could be wrong, though. Maybe I should check Wikipedia.

And I'm not just referring to the phenomenon by which you can go to Wikipedia to look up a single piece of information, start reading more of the article because it's interesting, then follow a link to another article and five hours later you're reading about the history of the Korean Turtle Ship (which is, genuinely, a pretty awesome vessel). That has the potential to be hugely entertaining, insomuch as learning is entertaining, but there are other little games you can play.

One of my favorites is to look up the page for someplace you know, like your hometown or county. Then click on the "Talk" tab. This opens up the discussion board for that post, where contributors have discussions regarding the accuracy and usefulness of what's been written in the article itself. About half of what you'll see here will just be calls for citations, but the rest is going to be really funny complaints about so-and-so adding biased information about a city council member while someone else (likely a 'concerned parent') vehemently debates where they should put mention of the one local kid who signed with the state university basketball team last year while everyone else points out that doesn't belong here at all.

My other favorite game is to find the first link in the first paragraph of every article that is not contained within parenthesis and click on it. Repeat ad infinitum and you will almost always find that you wind up on the page for philosophy. The tricky part is to guess how many pages you'll go through first. It's a bit like playing "seven degrees of Kevin Bacon", but with the caveat that sometimes you're going to be way over seven degrees here. But let's take the page for my hometown for example. I've just reviewed the "Talk" tab, and now I'm going to start clicking on links. I'm guessing... 15 pages before I wind up on Philosophy.

Well, it actually took 23 pages, so clearly I need to play more to get a feel for this. Wikipedia; hours of information and fun!