It’s one in the morning on a school night. The night is serene - no sisters arguing about who started the fight, no parents calling for someone to fill up their thermos, just the peaceful silence of the night. I’m sitting at my desk, bent over my laptop, concentrating intensely. What could possibly be keeping me up this late? A particularly difficult debate case? Some infuriating programming error? Netflix? While all of the previously listed items have been causes of sleepless nights many times in the past, this night, and numerous other nights, the reason for my insomnia is Wikipedia. I’m perusing an article on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a peace treaty which terminated Russia’s involvement in World War I. I have absolutely no idea how I got here. It feels like a moment ago I was reading about special relativity, but click after click on the little blue links embedded within the Wikipedia articles has led me to a completely unrelated topic.
Ever since middle school, losing myself in the seemingly infinite repository of information that Wikipedia provides has been a common occurrence for me. I would be reading about Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and then all of a sudden, I would find myself reading about in situ hybridization. It’s not that the original article failed to hold my interest. It’s just that whenever I stumble across something I don’t know or want to learn more about, I’m compelled to click on that enticing blue link, and the journey begins all over again.
The time that I spend on Wikipedia, reading numerous articles that encompass a variety of subjects from the humanities to science to politics, reflects how I find a lot of joy in the process of learning. Even when I’m not in school or in a learning environment, even if I’m just going through my everyday life, my curiosity and my love of making connections between all I know follows me in everything I do.
I like being able to connect my knowledge of science and engineering to the pseudoscience in science fiction TV shows like The Flash, analyzing the accuracy of the show’s scientific theory. When I’m taking a walk through the park next to my house, I relish the feeling of comprehension that dawns on me when I see something ordinary like rings on a tree trunk and connect that to what I’ve learned about lateral meristems. When the other Science Olympiad officers and I were struggling to figure out how to measure the ability of a new member versus a returning member on the diagnostic tests, I delighted in my realization that I could use what I’d learned in statistics that very day to determine teams by calculating the standard deviation of test results of continuing members and the standard deviation of test results of new members, and then assigning events based on individual z-scores. That feeling of comprehension, that Aha! moment when I can link what I’ve learned with what I see in the world around me, is what inspires me.
My desire to not only know more, but also to experience more is reflected in how I choose to spend my time. Just like my journey through Wikipedia involves me clicking link after link to satisfy my curiosity about any topic I am even slightly interested in, my journey throughout my high school years involves me taking part in diverse activities to please the different aspects of who I am - the researcher and scientist, the philosopher and rationalist, the programmer and engineer, the leader and human.
So even though I’m on Wikipedia much later at night than I should be, and for much longer than I should be, I don’t view my adventures getting lost in information as a distraction or hindrance. To me, Wikipedia is an opportunity to give my curiosity free rein and see just where it takes me.