As soon as I am in front of my computer in the morning, I have an urge to check Wikipedia regarding something I heard on the radio while I was still in bed. For a moment, I have to sit on my hands. Once the moment passes, I feel more confident. Even if I regularly use Wikipedia for research, this assignment is to write about not using it. Surely I won't need it for that.

I'm aware that Wikipedia is going dark to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) – I got a press release – but I know little about the act itself. If only there were some short, well-sourced article about it online, one that came top when I Googled ...

It's astonishing how reliant on Wikipedia I've become, both for work and as a way to waste time when I should be working. My browser history shows I've consulted it 34 times in the last seven days, on subjects as diverse as Vincent Van Gogh, Blue Monday, flexicurity and Madonna.

Over the past month I've looked up eschatology, dog meat consumption, The Killing (I wondered if the Danish title, Forbrydelsen, actually meant "The Killing"; it doesn't), rubric, geomagnetic reversal and Little Mix.

I treat the website as an extension of my brain: if I can get the information quickly enough, it's almost as if I knew it already. I've been known to read my phone under the table while answering my children's questions about the solar system with total authority. Today, I will have to say, "It's complicated", and leave the room.

Questions are regularly raised about Wikipedia's reliability and bias, but it's a perfect starting point for any subject one knows nothing about, and I generally use it not so much to check facts as to cure a failure of imagination: one link leads to another, down trails of inquiry it would never occur to me to pursue otherwise. That can be the only reason I actually looked up "wrinkle" the other day.

I'd love to be able to say it's made me more intelligent, but the knowledge I glean from Wikipedia stays with me, on average, for about a week. I dimly recall that eschatology is "the science of the last things", but three weeks after the fact I have no idea what vexillology is, or why I even cared. It's not in my dictionary.

The real miracle of Wikipedia is that its user-friendliness corresponds exactly to the idleness of my curiosity. When any more effort is required to find something out, it usually turns out I didn't want to know that badly.