Does anyone else find Wikipedia overwhelming?

[ASFTSN]

I've been thinking a lot recently about how difficult I find it to just 'look something up' any more in a way that feels like I'm absorbing the information.

The most accessible source of information online is easily Wikipeda. But before the internet was mainstream (when I was a child), if I wanted to look something up, I would go to the bookshelf and get the encyclopedia, and be given perhaps a few pages at most - and even then only on certain subjects -  if it was a good one.

But now I look up the Sami people and realise that if I want to digest all the information I've got in front of me, I've got 12 separate sections, each with multiple bullet points.

With the dead tree book encyclopedia, I feel like I would know the ultimate basics of this indigenous people and not much more, but it would be a good place to begin knowing more, and I'd remember it and be able to check out more about them if I wished elsewhere.  Now it seems like I want to know all of this stuff on the Wikipedia text and don't know where to begin, then feel overwhelmed and bibble off somewhere else.  The "granularity" of the information feels insane.

Also - I know there's been studies saying that if a text contains hyperlinks, most people will find it difficult to remember it and to concentrate, which is definitely the case for me.  I'll end up sidetracked and fascinated by a dozen different subjects, skim read it, and then be able to remember none of it a week later.

Am I just an idiot?  Or does anyone else have this when looking up stuff online?  Quite apart from any deliberate political/social bias that people like to talk about, the feeling of not knowing where to begin unless you're going through aggregate sites feels overwhelming to me.

[Famous Mortimer]

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-affair/

[biggytitbo]

Yes Philip Cross, an obsessive individual  who has made tens of thousands of malicious edits to the pages of anti establishment, anti war and left wing campaigners, politicians and journalists Wikipedia profiles, all in eerie concert with high profile hard core neocon journalists like Oliver Kamm and their various public attacks in newsprint and social media. Cross also, before his public exposure at least, had a very low twitter following, in the few hundred. Mysteriously, almost all of them were extremely high profile and well known centrist mainstream media journalists who have the single thing in common that they relentlessly attack Jeremy Corbyn and promote Blairite style neocon warmongering. Cross meticulously protects their Wikipedia pages whilst relentlessly shit posting on those of whoever they attack.

[ASFTSN]

Interesting, but not really what I meant.

[Blumf]

I've been thinking a lot recently about how difficult I find it to just 'look something up' any more in a way that feels like I'm absorbing the information.

The most accessible source of information online is easily Wikipeda. But before the internet was mainstream (when I was a child), if I wanted to look something up, I would go to the bookshelf and get the encyclopedia, and be given perhaps a few pages at most - and even then only on certain subjects -  if it was a good one.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/

[marquis_de_sad]

The online Encyclopaedia Britannica has library access. You just go through your library's website and put your library number in. Not all UK libraries subscribe to it though. I couldn't find a complete UK list during my brief search, but here's a list for London libraries: https://onlinelpl.wordpress.com

You can also access the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography with a library card: http://www.oxforddnb.com

[marquis_de_sad]

Oh and

Am I just an idiot?  Or does anyone else have this when looking up stuff online? 

You're not an idiot, I have this too. Focusing your attention on one thing is definitely better than flitting around. Carl Newport writes about this in various places from a pop-sci angle. I don't know enough about the studies he cites to really comment, but it sounds plausible to me that we are less efficient and our recall is worse when multi-tasking.

[Zetetic]

Multitasking isn't the same as following relationships, though, and serially reading different articles. I guess there's an argument that switching back-and-forth between articles resembles multitasking.

I imagine it depends quite a lot how you do it - one of the problems with Wikipedia is that the extent to which pages on related subjects are coherent (and liable to reinforce knowledge and understanding rather than defray it) depends entirely on particular Wikiprojects, I guess.

[New Jack]

Am I just an idiot?  Or does anyone else have this when looking up stuff online?  Quite apart from any deliberate political/social bias that people like to talk about, the feeling of not knowing where to begin unless you're going through aggregate sites feels overwhelming to me.

I know what you mean. Some topics seem like they take "encyclopedic" a bit too far. And now I cross reference everything if there's not a definitive source so as to not fall for FAKE NEWS. Plus everyone's a bloody expert - though I maintain you're only a fisherman once you've fished, and if you've just memorised the Wikipedia article on fishing, you're in the layman pile with the rest of us

I'm far more likely to use a Wikipedia page to see what sources they use and go from there, though I have tons of free time which helps.

I miss the Rotten Library, as now-noted terrorism journalist JM Berger was hired to write short articles on random subjects that skewed towards an entertaining overview. I'm not an overly paranoid person, but I struggle for single sources that I just trust.

There's an art to covering something authoritatively / reliably without turning it into an exercise in minutiae.