Go ahead: waste a day on Wikipedia. It's good for the future of humanity | Dan Gillmor

It takes some adventure, but when you do start clicking through to other places from the sites you regularly visit, it’s not just entertainment. It’s life

The other day, an internet writer made a confession: “we were stoned out of our minds” when she and a college friend edited the Wikipedia page for Amelia Bedelia, protagonist of the wildly popular children’s book series on which a generation grew up. They also made some stuff up, which found its way into other people’s work, including at least one newspaper.

What the writer, EJ Dickson, learned from the hoax “was not that Wikipedia itself isn’t reliable, but that so many people believe it is.”

Spending hours on Wikipedia is generally thought of as a time-wasting habit, but if critics of Internet sameness are right, maybe it’ll help you broaden your mind, or even find the inspiration to create a masterpiece.