The research rabbit hole

Finding the right facts for a story is important. You want it grounded in enough reality to flourish. But you do sorta have to cherry pick your facts. Want a story about life beyond the solar system? You're probably going to want to ignore that we can't actually go faster than light. Want a story about the horrors of the deep? You're going to have to make stuff up. Making stuff up is, at the end of the day, the job of a writer.

But you should still research things so you have a good selection of facts to cherry pick from. For example, I have the wiki page on Pyjama Sharks open right now along with a list of coral species and some facts about them. I'm writing a short horror story that involves sharks and coral and before I narrowed it down to the pyjama shark had to look at other species (I picked pyjama sharks because they're pretty small, pretty aggressive and really fucking cute). But it's easy to see how you could get lost in the search for knowledge because it's neat. And once you find all these good facts, you're going to want to use a lot of them.

• Let a lot of your sudden knowledge be backdrop to the story you're writing. YOU know how the shark goes vroom, but if it doesn't work with the story you have to not force it in. 
• A piece of advice I stole from an older writer who's name I can't remember was to mark where more research is needed with TK because it's easy to search TK in a manuscript and find the place immediately and by just marking it down you can keep writing what you can. I being lazier just tend to write things like FIGURE OUT HOW FAST THEY SWIM in all caps and keep going. 
• Limit yourself to three tabs of Wikipedia. Just do it. If you need more than that write for a bit and see if you actually need more than that. 

Research is important, it is very important and you should do it, but when you're writing fiction it's generally best to figure out your balance of fact to fiction before hand. Have some things you ignore and some facts you hyper focus on.