This Wikipedia blackout leaves my brain shorn of its extensions

As soon as I am in front of my computer in the morning, I have an urge to check Wikipedia regarding something I heard on the radio while I was still in bed. For a moment, I have to sit on my hands. Once the moment passes, I feel more confident. Even if I regularly use Wikipedia for research, this assignment is to write about not using it. Surely I won't need it for that. I'm aware that Wikipedia is going dark to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) – I got a press release – but I know little about the act itself. If only there were some short, well-sourced article about it online, one that came top when I Googled ... It's astonishing how reliant on Wikipedia I've become, both for work and as a way to waste time when I should be working. My browser history shows I've consulted it 34 times in the last seven days, on subjects as diverse as Vincent Van Gogh , Blue Monday , flexicurity and Madonna. Over the past month I've looked up eschatology, dog meat consumption, The Killing (I wondered if the Danish title, Forbrydelsen, actually meant "The Killing"; it doesn't), rubric, geomagnetic reversal and Little Mix . I treat the website as an extension of my brain: if I can get the information quickly enough, it's almost as if I knew it already. I've been known to read my phone under the table while answering my children's questions about the solar system with total authority. Today, I will have to say, "It's complicated", and leave the room. Questions are regularly raised about Wikipedia's reliability and bias, but it's a perfect starting point for any subject one knows nothing about, and I generally use it not so much to check facts as to cure a failure of imagination: one link leads to another, down trails of inquiry it would never occur to me to pursue otherwise. That can be the only reason I actually looked up "wrinkle" the other day. I'd love to be able to say it's made me more intelligent, but the knowledge I glean from Wikipedia stays with me, on average, for about a week. I dimly recall that eschatology is "the science of the last things", but three weeks after the fact I have no idea what vexillology is, or why I even cared. It's not in my dictionary. The real miracle of Wikipedia is that its user-friendliness corresponds exactly to the idleness of my curiosity. When any more effort is required to find something out, it usually turns out I didn't want to know that badly.