In WikiRace, reaching the destination matters. The premise is simple: you start on one Wikipedia article and must reach another using only the links you find along the way.
No search, no typing URLs, and no Ctrl+F. You have to read, choose a link, and hope the association takes you a little closer to your destination.
That is WikiRace, a game I created to turn Wikipedia into a space for exploration. Everyone starts on the same article, but each player invents their own path. If two people happen to be on the same page, they can even see each other’s cursors moving through the text—as if they had unexpectedly crossed paths in some very specific corner of the internet.
The project began with a video about a curious phenomenon: if you repeatedly click the first link in different Wikipedia articles, many paths eventually converge on Philosophy.
But what interested me was not only the convergence. It was everything that happens in between.
A WikiRace match might ask you to travel from “Toothbrush” to “Christianity.” The two subjects seem entirely unrelated. Still, there is a path between them—and probably more than one. Faced with this, every article becomes a kind of crossroads. You might click on “hygiene,” “plastic,” “health,” “civilization,” or any other idea that appears in the text. Each choice opens a new set of possibilities while closing off, at least for a few seconds, all the others.
When I showed the game to a friend, he mentioned a phrase: the chain of signifiers. I do not want to turn a race through Wikipedia into a psychoanalytic thesis. But the image stayed with me. A word does not carry its meaning entirely on its own. It points toward other words, which point toward still others, forming a chain of relationships, differences, and shifts. In the game, this becomes almost literal: every article contains dozens of exits, and every link offers a possible continuation of whatever route you are trying to construct.
The destination also changes how we read. If I need to reach “Christianity,” a reference to history, the Roman Empire, or religion immediately stands out. If the destination were “Plastic,” the same article would reveal entirely different openings. The text remains unchanged, but the word we are searching for reorganizes everything around it. In a sense, it is only after we arrive that the path begins to look logical. And that includes the mistakes.
I like this because it turns the result into a small story of how each player thought. Two people can begin in the same place and reach the same destination without sharing almost any of the steps in between. One follows science, another moves through popular culture, while someone else falls into a nineteenth-century war and somehow emerges on the right article.
Perhaps that is what interests me most about the game: discovering that two apparently distant things may be separated by only a few clicks, without there being a single correct path between them.
If you would like to play, create a room, and invite someone to get lost with you, visit wikirace.club.