Wikipedia syndrome, as defined by Urban Dictionary, is “the act of going to a site with the intention of looking up one piece of information, and instead finding yourself on one or more articles that have nothing to do with what you had originally come for. Stems from Wikipedia linking to articles within articles.” (If that’s bad, I don’t even want to know the symptoms of TVTropes syndrome.)
Restlessly fluttering between pages may be an inevitable consequence of wiki power-using, but there’s a neat Google Chrome plug-in that alleviates it somewhat. Rather than having to click through every link in a Wikipedia article, WikiPreview lets users evaluate the clickability of a given link by pulling up a preview of the next page.
The plug-in is handy, but it isn’t perfect: For one thing, it shows information for parent articles rather than subsections, even if the link goes to a subsection; for another, it sometimes has issues displaying link previews from further down the page. Chrome users can install WikiPreview here; true obsessives may want to try Wikipedia’s navigation popup tool, which does require users to create a Wikipedia account before setup.
(WikiPreview via Lifehacker)
