Writer overboard!

Is it normal to go overboard when writing stories?

I tend to do this when I write historical fiction. But I've seldom done as much research as this.

For example, I currently have open in my IE tabs a Wikipedia page on the shooting of the Romanov family, another Wikipedia page on the possessive adjective, a third one on the rifle, a website pertaining to the Mosin-Nagant range of rifles, a how-to guide on cleaning said Mosin-Nagant rifles, and finally a Wikipedia page on Mosin-Nagant themselves. This is just so the protagonist of my story can have a realistic description of his rifle and the cleaning process he undergoes. I estimate that said rifle will have approximately five sentences of screen time in the entire story, and yet I've been looking up information on it for the past twenty minutes.

And, you know, that's not even counting the three hours or so of fact-hunting and fact-checking I did on the entire Romanov family--a period of research which involved at least seven more Wikipedia pages, one eyewitness account, five pages of a forum discussion about Grand Duchess Maria's romantic inclinations and a healthy amount of physical trauma. (Kidding on the last bit. Durr.)

I suppose it's not normal to do this. Maybe Chronos will back me up (I honestly have no idea about her writing process--all I know is that she likes to pen fanfics, she won't tell me anything more) but let's admit it, Chronos is not exactly a candidate for normalcy either. Anyways, it's been said that writing is far and above a lonely profession, so I suppose that doing things your own way is less of an issue in this trade than it is in, say, a bomb-dismantling line of work.

~Mnemosyne

PS If you're interested about the story behind all this, I am proud to tell you that I currently have 804 words down. Only about a thousand left. -grins like a manic plot bunny-

Edit: It gets worse. I actually looked up the obsolete Russian system of measurement in order to figure out whether a character would say "inches away" or "centimetres away". (The answer, by the way, is inches--Russia was "metrified" in 1925, and the story is set in 1918--although I declined to mention it in-story as diuym, the transliteration of the native term.)

2nd Edit: It's currently an ungodly hour in the morning but I've just hit 2345 words. Thought you'd like to know. (Earlier? "A thousand words left"? I lied. Hehe.)