The Wiki Game

If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. Maybe it’s for work, or for faking your way through cocktail party conversation about the latest season of “The Americans.” Either way, this is your opportunity to make use of all that time you’ve spent reading random articles on the site.

Browsing around the site will show dozens of different pages in the “What links here” column on the right side of each page. “What links here” is an indicator that shows all the other Wikipedia articles that contain links to that page—which means it’s a list of every single Wikipedia article that is related to whatever you’re looking at right now.

This could be used as a basic tool to help find information, but the real fun happens when you start playing around with those links. You can copy and paste any list of links into your favorite text editor and then press Control+F (Command + F on Macs) to open up a text search and see where else those links are used. This will take some trial and error because every Wikipedia article is assigned its own unique ID number in order to keep track of changes on the site, so if you type in the wrong number for something you’ll get no results

It’s been said that Wikipedia is the best thing ever invented—except for all the other things that have been invented. It’s an incredible resource, but it can also be a black hole of distraction. One of the most fun ways to utilize your time on Wikipedia is to play around with and learn about game speedrunning.