How CSS Can Prevent You From Wasting Hours on Wikipedia

Have you ever found yourself browsing an interesting entry on Wikipedia and encountered some term or capitalized title that you didn't quite understand? Let's say you were finally getting with the times on cryptocurrency: what it is, what it does, if it's right for you, how it came about and so on. You stumble across this interesting man's name, Satoshi Nakamoto, but you don't want to be hassled with wheel-clicking the hyperlink to blow open a new tab and read blocks of hypnotizing text to learn more about him.

Well, web developers rejoice: There's a CSS-driven solution out there to fix that spell of totally understandable laziness that I'm unashamedly guilty of myself. There's a modification in the works that allows you to simply hover over embedded hyperlinks in Wikipedia articles and expand a small window with a short summary and a relevant photo of the person, place or idea. This means one important thing for Internet as a whole: no more 15-tab expeditions into Wikipedia's territory.

If the Internet has taught us one thing, it's that people will argue about almost anything you set in front of them. If it's a simple picture of a rock, they'll find some way to argue about it. Apparently, going to Wikipedia and seeing relevant pictures included with the blocks of text is argument material. Personally, I'm not too sure. People are concerned that the website's engine wasn't designed to handle this level of interaction and that it can prove more annoying than helpful. The next time a picture of a rock pops up when I mouse over Dwayne Johnson's hyperlink, I'll remember to start fires about it.

On a serious note, I think the concerns are warranted for the most part, but this is how the Internet developed into the beast that it is now. Wikipedia has been the same old idea for how long now? I admit that my biggest problem with using their site is the inevitable explosion of 10-20 tabs that explain the explanation for whatever it was that I originally searched. Before long, I forget that I was looking up something on rocks and find myself arguing about them in a corner of the Internet I never meant to end up on, and it all started with a search on cryptocurrency.

Maybe, just maybe, this iota of CSS genius can fix that.