I’ve always liked to read spoilers – short synopses of movies and books that reveal the twist ending and explain what all the mystery is about.  Some people think I’m weird, but I think that there’s so much media out there that I don’t have time to watch a 2 hour movie or read a whole book just to see what happened.

Over the summer, the producers of the TV show Lost developed an Alternate Reality Game called “The Lost Experience” that slowly released clues about the show – about the Hanso Foundation, the Numbers, etc.  The only issue was that the clues were so scattered that you had to spend a lot fo time hunting them down, assembling them, and keeping on top of the game.  I’m a fan of Lost, but not enough of a fan to spend 24 hours tracking down the backstory of some minor character.

Imagine my joy at finding http://www.lostpedia.com/, which answers every major mystery on Lost.  Fans who played the Lost Experience and combed the Internet for clues assembled them all into a coherent, well-developed story that explains away a ton of the larger mysteries on the show.

I won’t spoil the mysteries here, but Lostpedia includes the following pieces of information:

• An explanation of what the Numbers mean
• What the DHARMA initiative was developed to do, and how the island figures into it
• Photos (and video!) of Alvar Hanso – his explanation of what DHARMA is, and where he is today
• A full list (with YouTube links) of all the Orientation videos, including some which haven’t appeared in the TV show but have appeared in the Lost Experience
• A full list of Dharma logos and stations

The only (minor) issue to having everything explained is that the only thing I have to look forward to is more backstory on the main characters of the TV show, and that’s probably my least favorite part of the show.  How much more can I found out about Jack’s divorce, or Sun and Jin‘s marital troubles, or why Sawyer and Kate might make a good couple?  Most of my interest was in finding out answers to the larger mysteries, and now that I have the answers there’s not much more to find out.

This seems like wiki culture at its finest – using a group of unrelated, geographically distant researchers to assemble and the information and present it in a coherent way.  The YouTube clips (see example) with transcripts alone are amazing – I wish all my company’s media was tagged this well!

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I’ll keep watching the show for now, but I hope the pace picks up soon.  If not, I’ll just skip the watching and read all the answers on www.lostpedia.com.