It's not the destination, it's the journey.
Liquid: I've been up all night doing research.
Ocelot: Research? On what?
Liquid: Well, it was supposed to be on the current geopolitcs of modern nuclear weaponry.
Liquid: I got slightly sidetracked.
A trope we can all relate to...
A
Wiki Walk is a train of thought that left the track and is
Riding Into The Sunset. When going for a
Wiki Walk you know where you begin, but no one knows
where you'll end. Are you a
Mad Scientist building a
orbital death ray? Well, too bad, inspiration struck and now it's
the world's biggest dancing dish washer with a fully adjustable cup holder. You want to have a
serious talk about the Middle East? Within ten minutes you'll be arguing whether
Darth Vader could take Gandalf in a fight. Just want to check the
Rule Of Cool page? Before you know it you're adding examples to
Bungling Inventor. You, my friend, have just had a
Wiki Walk.
The key feature of a
Wiki Walk is that if someone were to see only the beginning and end of the
Wiki Walk it would seem
completely random, while in fact there was a series of thoughts that connected the beginning and end result, or it is at least implied that this is the case.
If in a mystery, it could easily cause a
Eureka Moment.
A common version of this trope is when a
Wiki Walk is still in progress at the end of a scene, and then we catch the end of the conversation, which usually takes the form of a
Noodle Incident, in the beginning of a later scene.
A
Cloud Cuckoo Lander is particularly susceptible to these, though we mostly only hear the end result. This is most likely responsible for the stranger half of any
Are You Pondering What Im Pondering moment.
If there is a database involved it will usually overlap with an
Archive Binge, and is one of the reasons
Tv Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.
A
Sub Trope of this is the
Halfway Plot Switch, when the plot seems to do this.
Named for the ability of any troper to start out on a page and, two or three links later, find himself reading a totally unrelated trope. Definitely an example of
Truth In Television. Often cannot be recreated, as
anyone who has spotted an interesting trope en route, planned to come back to it, and then forgotten what it was will attest. Also results in loss of
The Game. Doing it intentionally for fun is known as "playing Wiki Tag."
Examples:
Advertising
Anime and Manga
Film
- Captain B. McCrea from Wall E receives some major character development using one of these. He starts with "Earth" and ends on "Dancing," after passing through "Sea," "Farms," "Pizza," and "Hoedown."
- In Finding Nemo Dory starts to go down this path several times, but she is usually stopped.
- Monty Python And The Holy Grail. The narrator at the beginning of "Scene 24."
Literature
- Discworld has Leonard of Quirm, whose inventions are rarely what he initially intends because he gets distracted along the way.
- The Discworld GURPS supplement has a special ability for the above: every time you create something there's a chance you might create something revolutionary but unrelated.
- Lord Vetinari has, in fact, spent many a long afternoon speculating on the fate of the world should Leonard ever maintain his focus on any one thing for longer than an hour.
- In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue
" by Edgar Allan Poe, Auguste Dupin shows off his general awesomeness by tracking the narrator's train of thought through fifteen minutes of silent walking and several mental topic shifts, and saying exactly the right thing at the end.
- Later imitated by Sherlock Holmes, who was tracking Watson's thoughts at the time.
- Lakheenahuknaasi, in Armageddon, thinks that the tendency to be lead on Wiki Walks is "an insidious spell" protecting "wiccan pee-dee-ah".
- Bruce Coville's My Teacher is an Alien series perfectly describes the Wikipelunking phenomenon, many years before wikis existed. In it, aliens have developed an integrated virtual reality that is perfectly realistic, and used entirely for research purposes, showing the user whatever they want (basically, Wikipedia meets a Lotus Eater Machine). The aliens have learned to put time limits on the technology so that no one starves to death.
Live Action TV
- The main character of Scrubs, JD, experiences daydreams that cause him to go on three-part wiki walks. The trigger comment, the daydream, and his verbal response.
- Doug the drug rehab man does this frequently with names of drugs in Little Britain.
- Stephen Colbert goes on purposeful Wiki Walks on The Colbert Report using The DaColbert Code for purposes ranging from predicting Oscar winners to solving the murder of JFK.
- To date, things the DaColbert Code has been right about include ten correct Oscar picks and a Presidential election.
- QI is more a televised, bloody funny Wiki Walk than anything else.
- Constable Frank Gladstone from The Thin Blue Line is a master of this, often omitting the intervening steps and just announcing his seemingly random conclusions to his perplexed comrades. His explanation of why fridge magnets are to blame for teen graffiti is a classic.
- In a flashback episode of The West Wing, Press Secretary C.J. Cregg uses this to remember a reporter's name.
- An example that predates the Web would be the BBC series Connections and it's succesor series which would take two seemingingly unrelated facts or inventions and through a fascininating chain of thought demonstrate how they were inextricably linked
Web Comics
- This xkcd shows us the danger of falling into these. (The image is reproduced above, but, as usual with Munroe, the punch line is in the alt-text.)
- The Bungling Inventor of RPG World started repairing a broken appliance (IIRC, a toaster, please confirm), and ended up building a time machine.
- This Wondermark.
- The protagonist in this episode of Mountain Time makes mental jumps from misunderstanding a comment about sandwiches to encountering unsettling creatures in another dimension. Somehow, this makes him realize he's been talking to a snake.
- This Cyanide And Happiness teaches a lesson on why one should not look up time-sensitive matters such as preventing blood loss on That Other Wiki.
- Twisted Kaiju Theater makes an actual plot point out of this.
- Sheldon's grandfather goes from canola oil to Montana mountain goats.
Western Animation
- In Darkwing Duck, Mr Muddlefoot does this several times through the show.
- An episode of Pinky And The Brain shown from Pinky's perspective (complete with his nose in the center of the camera view) reveals that his random responses to Brain's Catch Phrase, "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?" are the end result of a Wiki Walk.
- In Animaniacs, "Chairman of the Bored" a character goes on a long and boring Wiki Walk, he even manages to scare the titular characters with it.
- In the South Park episode "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", the scientist (a parody of Ian Malcolm, and his chaos theory rants) who helps the characters discover the purpose of the probe (which is a transmissions satellite) makes all his deductions by hearing some unrelated phrase, then linking seemingly arbitrary ideas together to form the correct solution.
- This is also how the Super Friends used to solve the Riddler's riddles. Make of that what you will.
Real Life
- When you think about it, most people's brains work in just this kind of roundabout train of thought...
- Creating one of these is more or less the point of Telephone Oracle
- The game Wikiball (starting at random page and getting to another) is basically one giant Wiki Walk. Nabhani (disambiguation) to Avatar? Nabhani——> Oman——> Education——> Humanities ——> Internet ——> BBC——> Broadcasting——> DVD——> video——> Film——> Animation——> Anime——> Anime-influenced animation——> Avatar The Last Airbender
- Variations include Random Page to Featured Article and Random Page to Hitler.
- Self-imposed challenge: can you make it without using the media or index pages?
- Free association is a form of psychotherapy that, at least in one form, is essentially a mental Wiki Walk. (The game "word association" is a multi-player version of this.)
- Wikipedian Tag, which is what happens when you combine Wiki Walking with the game of Tag. Considering the rules have leeway as far as "victory conditions" for the runner(s) go, one could easily append a runner victory for reaching Hitler.
- In the SoCal region, this is generally referred to as "Wiki Surfing."
- Probably the reason for most of this page's visitors.
