Wikiracing

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Wikiracing is a game in which players compete to navigate from one Wikipedia page to another using only internal links. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] It has many different variations and names, including The Wikipedia Game, Wikipedia Maze, Wikispeedia, Wikiwars, Wikipedia Ball, Wikipedia Racing, and Wikipedia Speedrunning. [6] External websites have been created to facilitate the game. [7]

Contents

The Seattle Times has recommended it as a good educational pastime for children [8] and the Larchmont Gazette has said, "While I don't know any teenagers who would curl up with an encyclopedia for a good read, I hear that a lot are reading it in the process of playing the Wikipedia Game". [9]

The Amazing Wiki Race has been an event at the TechOlympics. [10]

The average number of links separating any English-language Wikipedia page from the United Kingdom page is 3.67. Thus, it has been occasionally banned in the game. Other common rules such as not using the United States page increase the game's difficulty. [11]

The rules of wikiracing can be used as a method for studying aspects of Wikipedia. [12]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Wikipedia</span>

Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiki</span> Type of website that visitors can edit

A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">MediaWiki</span> Free and open-source wiki software

MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker, after which it has been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers several wiki hosting websites across the Internet, as well as most websites hosted by the Foundation including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software. MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language and stores all text content into a database. The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of views per second. Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest and most visited websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been a major concern for developers. Another major aspect of MediaWiki is its internationalization; its interface is available in more than 400 languages. The software has more than 1,000 configuration settings and more than 1,800 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed. Besides its usage on Wikimedia sites, MediaWiki has been used as a knowledge management and content management system on websites such as Fandom, wikiHow and major internal installations like Intellipedia and Diplopedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English Wikipedia</span> English-language edition of Wikipedia

The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.

wikiHow Wiki-based how-to website

wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring how-to articles and quizzes on a variety of topics. Founded in 2005 by Internet entrepreneur Jack Herrick, its aim is to create an extensive database of instructional content, using the wiki model of open collaboration to allow users to add, create, and modify content. It is a hybrid organization, a for-profit company run for a social mission. wikiHow uses a forked version of the free and open-source MediaWiki software; these modifications made by wikiHow were freely available to the general public via a self-serve download site from 2010 to late 2020, when wikiHow chose to discontinue the self-serve portal, citing vague "DoS attacks", as well as noting that publishing the source code is "not part of our core mission". The site's text content is released under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jimmy Wales</span> Co-founder of Wikipedia (born 1966)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">WikiPilipinas</span> Online, free content encyclopedic website

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia Foundation</span> American charitable organization

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, the seventh most visited website in the world. In addition, the foundation hosts 14 other related content projects. It supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software that underpins them all.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry Sanger</span> American Internet project developer and Wikipedia co-founder

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References

  1. Whelan, Aubrey (21 July 2010). "'Wikiracing' picking up speed among college students". The Philadelphia Inquirer .
  2. Jones, Ben (20 June 2010). "Latest game for bored students? Wikiracing". Star Tribune .
  3. Doctoroff, Ariel (22 July 2010). "Want To Waste An Hour (Or Three)? Go On A Wikirace". Huffington Post .
  4. Colin Hepke (2008). "On Your Mark, Get Set, Wikipedia"! Archived 2012-04-03 at the Wayback Machine Cornerstone 2(3), 8.
  5. Jones, Ben (8 July 2010). "Students glued to computers turn Wikipedia into a game". College Times . Archived from the original on 18 July 2012.
  6. Stefan Thaler, Katharina Siorpaes, Elena Simperl and Christian Hofe (2011). "A Survey on Games for Knowledge Acquisition". Archived 25 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine Semantic Technology Institute International . pgs 14-17.
  7. Walker, John (10 June 2010). "Searching For Fun: Wikipedia Game". Rock, Paper, Shotgun .
  8. Stevens, Heidi (14 August 2011). "Zero in on your child's lack of focus"". The Seattle Times .
  9. Plumez, Jacqueline Hornor (25 September 2008). "The Career Doctor". Larchmont Gazette. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 16 November 2011.
  10. Denise Smith Amos. "500 teens converge for TechOlympics". Cincinnati Enquirer , 3/5/2010
  11. Read, Brock (28 May 2008). "6 Degrees of Wikipedia". The Chronicle of Higher Education .
  12. "I Made a Graph of Wikipedia... This Is What I Found" on YouTube