The Wikipedia Game

Anyone want to play a high stakes match?

(Why, no, that isn't a directed graph of wikipedia articles and a BFS implementation behind my back.)

There are actually quite a few such sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Game

It's one of these concepts that keeps poping up independently at many places (there used to be edit wars at Wikipedia pages about manual versions of this game with many people claiming they invented it :).

I did one myself long ago:

http://wikifighting.com

It was one of the first and it got pretty popular for a brief period of time.

The trouble with such sites is that you have to babysit them because they will get broken when Wikipedia changes.

Okay the implementation of this is really well done. It had everything I was expecting an automated version of this game would have.

My one complaint is that the frame for the game seemed quite slow compared to normal scrolling on Wikipedia (Just checked and yes there is a noticeable lag in scrolling in Chrome on Windows). This is some what frustrating in a game designed for speed!

What's to stop people from editing Wikipedia articles to shorten their click paths?

I've always thought it would be fun to play a "black hat" wikipedia game. You would register an account, and then proceed to make false edits throughout the site.

To get scores, we'd take all of the edits for each account and multiply the brazenness/funniness of the edit by the number of pageviews you got before the edit was reversed.

The game ends when you get banned.

It's pretty fun, however, you can use firebug or a similar tool to just change the html to link directly to the answer ;-)

There was a link on HN a few days ago to this site[1] that automates that process, so you can cheat :)

[1]http://www.xltd.com/WikiMindMap/WikiPath.htm (but it seems like it does not work right now)

We used to play this game at school. We just did it ourselves though (without a website). I think your page is a bit confusing, and it doesn't leave me with any idea of where to start.

I'd simplify the page, and make it obvious! Good luck.

I'm the guy making this game, thanks for playing!

Got any feedback? Thanks.

Excellent idea, really love the fact you've made a game out of what everyone experiences on wikipedia already. One issue, scrolling the article on the iPad doesn't work. Other than that, awesome.

A similar game I like to play is with Foursquare; keep clicking through friends and locations to get from one location to another around the world.

This is worse than tvtropes.

Or, How To Think Like A Link