The Wikipedia Game

Back when I was an undergraduate student, I worked as a tour guide on my university campus. During our slow times in the office, the staff would sometimes play “The Wikipedia Game.” The rules were simple. You would be given two terms. You would start on the first term and, using only the blue hyperlinks to work from page to page, you would try to connect yourself all the way to your final term. You couldn’t undo any choices; you could only move forward. Whoever connects their two pages the fastest wins!

For example, your first term could be “Alexander Hamilton” which you have to connect to the second term “The Haunted Mansion.” Starting on the Alexander Hamilton page you could scroll to popular culture to find a musical bearing the same written by Lin Manuel Miranda who wrote music for the film Moana which is a production of Walt Disney Pictures of the Walt Disney Company which operates theme parks including Disneyland where the attraction The Haunted Mansion first opened.

The content of tools and terms for this week made me remember this wild taxonomy game! It always made you think about how things are connected and you would be shocked how many ways you can connect seemingly unrelated things: Franz Ferdinand and Gatorade, Monarch butterflies and the War of 1812, the Treaty of Versailles and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. If you’re ever bored with your friends and have some computers on hand, I highly recommend this silly game of indexing!

-SMT