Is the internet killing research? My guess is that the answers to this will be sharply divided along a tweed/no-tweed border, with elbow patches and pipes at one far end of the spectrum and clever tshirt slogans and chai lattes at the t’other.

Recently I have been attempting to write a novel that I have decided should take place in a small village in Romania; nowhere else will do. Yet, I’ve never been to Romania. I also have no disposable income to pay for a trip there, nor a benevolent publisher who might cover the cost of the trip under the guise of “research”.

In days gone by, this would have caused a problem. To accurately portray a country as unfamiliar as Romania is to me, I would have had to spend weeks, months even years in libraries digging out facts about population, geography, cultural preferences, history and so forth in order to create a believable backdrop against which to set the story. I might have spoken to people from that country, or those who had visited it; maybe sampled indigenous foods, listened to music – anything to get a better feel for the place.

That process is changing. Nowadays, thanks to the internet and its many search engines writers can conduct their research at a much-accelerated pace. Chief among the millions of web resources is its most frequently-visited encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Wikipedia means no more hours spent in dimly-lit library backrooms, shoulder deep in dusty books. Research has now been boiled down to a few hours on a laptop at a crumb-flecked table in an overpriced coffee shop.

This may not necessarily be a good thing.