👀 Six degrees of separation via Wikipedia

#297 | What do sepsis & Sonam Kapoor have in common?

At some point in their Internet life, everyone's fallen into the Wikipedia rabbit hole, right? You know, the one where you look up something on Wikipedia, click on a link, then another and another, until you're reading an article that is in absolutely no way related to what you started with.

The Wiki Game is based on exactly this phenomenon. It's a simple enough task - the website throws up two unrelated topics - say Eastern Christianity and Show business. Should you choose to start the round, you have exactly 120 seconds to navigate your way from one article to the other across the vast trenches of Wikipedia.

It's far more challenging than you'd think, especially with the time constraint. Imagine scanning a long Wiki article in mere seconds whilst simultaneously honing on the precise link that could get you one step closer to your destination. The possibilities are literally limitless. You have to think fast, read fast, and click faster. How else would you manage to connect Federated State to Muhammad? Or Neuroscience to Axl Rose?

The site displays stats and paths from the winners of each round, and in hindsight, the answers seem fairly obvious.

A serial procrastinator could lose days on end to this rather frustrating game - when you find that your wins are just that little bit out of reach, you're just compelled to keep playing again... and again... okay one last round, then I'm done.

Pai

They have an iPhone app if you want to kill many... MANY hours wading through Wikis without ever really reading them.