As much fun as you can have looking at obscure and weird Wikipedia pages, what’s really fun about Wikipedia is looking at the pages for completely mundane, everyday things.
There’s something amusing about having a concept explained to you that is so familiar it would never occur to you to look it up, but it’s also fascinating because even though you use a towel every day, you really do not know anything about towels. I could not tell you the history of towels or the types of towels or even come up with an accurate and exhaustive definition of “towel” twenty minutes ago. Almost everything, including things that are part of every day of our lives, is mostly unknown to us.
I feel like this is a form of art. The objective tone and factuality of Wikipedia should be what separates it from the “artistic,” but this kind of systematic definition, description, exploration and exemplification…
…when applied to something like a “hug,” it’s…something else. I am being shown the world and the nature of humans, and it’s beautiful.
The Wikipedia article for Humans is really something else. It’s just back to back sentences that sound like they could have been written by an alien and sentences that could definitely only have been written by us.
Tags:
#Wikipedia #the wondrous variety of sapient life #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what