Tafting is the act of excitedly clicking link after link in Wikipedia
until you find you're a million topics away from where you started. It
was named by Daniel Biddle after this cartoon:

http://www.xkcd.com/214/

Writing webpages and poems is a bore, or rather is hard, unless
there's a good taft subject behind them. I was wondering if there were
ways to get into tafting more easily. The best idea I had so far was
to monitor my browsing history for long Wikipedia taft chains, and
then extract the first and last URIs from each chain.

The idea is that the first in the chain was what started the taft in
the first place, so it might be a reusable seed taftpoint. The idea of
using the last in the chain is that perhaps I was interrupted or
distracted at that point, and that it would be a good point to pick up
again.

One recent taft chain that I remember was looking at the history of
the alphabet, which sort of led to an investigation of the history of
writing in general. I don't actually remember well how it started or
how it ended, but I remember the stuff in the middle pretty well,
especially the stuff about Sumerian.