njbrown.com

The ultimate guide to Wikipedia racing

How to play & best strategies

I went skiing this spring break with family and friends! It was very fun, but unfortunately, the lifts are only open from 8:30am to 4:00pm. So what did I do with the rest of my time? Well, I did some AP Calculus & Linear Algebra homework, watched Season 2 of TSITP[1], and played a lot of Wikipedia racing.

1. What is Wikipedia racing?

In one sentence: Start on a Wikipedia page and navigate to another Wikipedia page with only blue links. You and your friends all 'race' from one page to the other, and the person who makes it there fastest wins. Two key rules:

  1. You can't use CMD/CTRL + F to search the page.
  2. No using the back button on your browser.

These are additional rules you can add as you see fit:

2. Strategies

I've played a lot of Wikipedia racing and come up with the following strategies:

  1. Click early & often. It's better to make small, quick steps towards the goal, rather than reading a page for too long.
  2. Become familiar with "connectors": pages that connect many distinct topics. For example: the Water page has links to Antarctica, skiing, diamagnetism, caffeine, produce, Hinduism, fire, etc. If you can get familiar with a checkpoint and where its different links live, you'll have an advantage over your friends.
  3. Let's say you're dealing with something intangible or something that is more of a "concept" (like religion, truth, whatever). If you repeatedly click the first non-parenthesized, non-italicized link, there is a 97% chance you'll get to Philosophy. From there, you can access existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, language, etc.

3. Why should I even bother playing?

It's fun! It also probably makes you a little smarter and more knowledgeable. You could also learn about the comprehensive list of helicopter prison escapes.

  1. The Summer I Turned Pretty. Excellent show. ↩︎