Wikipedia:Curiosity killed the cat

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Shortcut WP:CURIOUS

Your first encounter with editing Wikipedia may be over some very specific issue: say, a silly statement you've spotted as a reader and that you want to correct. But then you get curious as to why that silly statement was there in the first place and you go to the page history for the first time. You dig a bit deeper, learn about talk pages, discover other articles with similarly silly statements...

At some point in the journey you realise that Wikipedia has significant gaps in important topics that you have the expertise to fill in. But before you're able to pursue that, your curiosity draws you further in, you come across the backlogs where you start to help out, and at some point some page on your watchlist is nominated for deletion – your first encounter with the deletion venues! Then follow more discussion venues to discover and more intriguing new articles to come across. There's so much going on in Wikipedia!

Before you know it, you've forsaken your original goal of making significant improvements to important articles, and you've instead embarked on a crusade against articles about non-notable fictional parrots, you've spent days crafting the perfect category structure for villages in Togo, and you're making plans for the summer you'll dedicate to improving Wikipedia's coverage of the aesthetics of pre-revolutionary French hummus.

Your curiosity is what brought you here, but maybe it would have been better, both for you and for the encyclopedia, if it hadn't been so great.

• Wikipedia:Don't stuff beans up your nose, one way for curiosity to kill the cat