Wikipedia. It's One HUGE Hypertext.

Hypertexts are defined as:

"a database format in which information related to that on a display can be accessed directly from the display" (Merriam- Webster Dictionary).

By this definition, Wikipedia would then be one of the largest hypertexts that are available on the internet. It is one big database that has more than 3.5 million articles, according to this New York Times article published last month. Every page has multiple links that give users access to other Wikipedia sites by clicking on a link. It's that simple.

We saw this same process in the hypertext readings for February 15th. You read a passage, you click on a link, you read another passage, you click again. The cycle just continues until you get to the end of the story.

This sounds a lot like using Wikipedia: read, click, read, click, etc. You could spend hours on that site reading related articles. Sometimes though, you don't even know how you got to the topic you are reading about. I have had instances where I have to trace way back into my history to figure out what I was reading about originally on Wikipedia.

This is an example of how I can get side-tracked on Wikipedia:

Started my search with Chicago.

Clicked on Barack Obama.

Clicked on Hawaii.

Clicked on volcano.

By the time I get to volcano I have no idea where I began. Wikipedia can be so random (and sometimes frustrating), but I think that is part of the reason why it works so well.

In high school, my friends and I would play something we titled "Wikipedia Races" when we were bored in class. You started with a random word such as 'beach ball' and had a predetermined word to end up on such as 'Saturday Night Live'. You would then race to see who could get to that last page the quickest. The trick was to click as few hyperlinks as possible; the less pages you had to go through, the more likely you were to win.

So we might jump from article to article and we might get side-tracked along the way, but who is to say that this is a bad thing? Hypertexts are based on the fact that we, as the readers, will click to continue on. Wikipedia is one big story, I would argue that we all arrive at different conclusions.

Kthxbye,

rachel.l.marten