I love Wikipedia!! Seriously. If some extremely specific catastrophe left me with the choice of only preserving one website on the Internet, I would save Wikipedia. It’s a crowd-sourced, accessible fountain of information on almost any topic you could ever be interested in, one that’s near-limitless and constantly updating. 1.8 edits are made every second; through these minuscule increments, an immense archive of human knowledge has formed — the English-language version recently passed 3.5 billion words across 6 million articles.
One of my favorite ways to waste time is scrolling through Wikipedia articles. I’m especially partial to the “Personal Life” section of pages on celebrities or authors. Anytime I watch a movie, you can find me on the Wikipedia page after finishing, checking out details about the director’s inspirations or what critics are saying. Everything from nuclear radiation incidents to bank heists to Romantic poets is fair game, and linked articles lead to new discoveries each time.
Scholastic Bowl has become one of my favorite things I’ve been involved with in my four years at North. Wikipedia has been a big part of that — my years of absorbing esoteric, seemingly useless information has lent itself to remembering random facts about Watergate or Sylvia Plath. At practice, any new topic is an opportunity for a Wikipedia deep dive: the stories behind paintings like Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait or Wood’s American Gothic (fun fact: this painting made a kid at my elementary school burst into tears), amusing anecdotes about ancient philosophers or scientists.
It’s not perfect, of course — since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, the site has seen its fair share of incidents and mishaps, ranging from large in scale to merely amusing. One Chinese woman created over 200 articles over a decade that contained elaborate and entirely falsified pieces of medieval Russian history (Zhemao hoaxes) before being discovered. Pete Buttigieg’s Wikipedia page has had an oddly attentive editor for years.
My interests are ever-changing; I have a short attention span. Recently, I’ve been fascinated by the wives of famous male artists: did you know F. Scott Fitzgerald took snippets from Zelda Fitzgerald’s diary for his writing and directly quoted her for Daisy’s famous line “a beautiful little fool” in The Great Gatsby? Or that Edward Hopper’s wife Josephine thought up the names for several of her husband’s paintings, including Nighthawks, and that she was his only model?
One of my favorite Instagram accounts is @depthsofwikipedia, a collection of articles that exemplify what makes Wikipedia so great: the obscure, ultra-specific information you can’t truly find anywhere else. Some recent posts from the account include: a pop group where every member was replaced as an example of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, the IKEA effect cognitive bias, and English triple contractions.
If you’re ever bored, try playing The Wiki Game. The game takes advantage of the interlinked nature of Wikipedia articles and challenges you to move from one article to an entirely disparate one just by clicking links, like moving from the page for giraffe to the one for guitar. Here’s a screenshot of how I got from Selena Gomez to the Apollo program (surprisingly easily): Selena Gomez → Grand Prairie, Texas (her birthplace) → Texas → United States → Space Race → Apollo 11 → Apollo program.
Another one I tried: Tibet → Chinese language → China → 2008 Summer Olympics → Olympic Games → Winter Olympic Games → Ice hockey at the 1924 Winter Olympics → Ice hockey.
After I landed on Wikipedia as the topic for this blog post, I also decided to try my hand at editing an article myself. I signed up for an account, and I was off!
I looked up the best way to get started with editing, and since I was too scared to edit any actual information, one of the beginner-friendly tasks I found was “de-orphaning articles.” Orphan articles are articles that have no other outside articles linking to them, so something fairly simple to do is to find another related article and link it from there.
I picked one at random, an article about a social drama film called Broken Bridges from 2004. I linked to the article from the screenwriter’s page: seen below!
Strangely fun. I rely on Wikipedia whenever I need quick information about a topic or person, so I guess I might try and edit when I have free time — maybe I’ll even advance to adding new information, like to a band’s page from an interview.
Thanks for reading me rambling about Wikipedia for 750 words. If you’re ever bored, go down a rabbit hole and learn something new!
Ivy,
I always wondered why when we were little kids our teachers told us to avoid Wikipedia like the plague when as you’ve said it represents such an expansive wealth of knowledge. If I’m being honest, I’ve never dug myself into a deep Wikipedia hole but I’m feeling very tempted to do so after reading your blog. I think my general knowledge on history and culture (besides current pop culture) is definitely lacking so I feel like a dedicated Wikipedia session would make me feel like I’m taking steps to better educate myself. In your blog, you mentioned how recently you’ve been interested in learning about the wives of famous artists. This reminded me of one of my favorite books, Fatal Throne, as it features the stories of all six wives of Henry VIII from their perspective. I’m curious as to whether you’ve read this book because I feel like you would enjoy how it offers the female perspective and how that challenges what men have tried to paint as the single story at this point in history. This book was also written by multiple authors who consulted various historical documents and sources (as well as took some artistic liberties) which is very similar to the nature of Wikipedia. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do and if you have read it, I would still recommend it as it is one of the few books I enjoyed reading a second time.
Hey Ivy! I have to agree with you that Wikipedia is one of the most important sources online. If I could only preserve one website, it would either be that or YouTube – I think preserving culture or having a way to see how it changed over time is the most important thing. The personal life page is also a highlight for me, and I think it’s really interesting to use it as a way to make connections from really famous people to me – like looking at the Wikipedia page for North and finding out that Bob Odenkirk went here! I love falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes, so I thought I’d try a hand at the game that you linked. I had to go from fever to animal, and I got so jumbled up in the medical terminology, I had no idea how to get to anything that would help me. I played a couple times and got the hang of it. I have so much respect for people who edit Wikipedia, especially because of all the flak they get because it is a supposedly unreliable source. I definitely have to try editing a Wikipedia article one day as penance for all the times I’ve used it. Next time I find myself clicking on random links for 15 minutes, I’ll definitely think of you!
Hey Ivy,
I thoroughly enjoyed reading about your appreciation for Wikipedia. There are so many accessible random articles and pieces of information that you can sift through and get information from. I think it is so interesting how Wikipedia is essentially an accumulation of human knowledge and the optime of knowledge expansion due to technological availability. It’s honestly so impressive how we’ve gotten to this point. I feel like Wikipedia gets such a bad reputation because people think it’s largely misinformation, but the majority of the information on Wikipedia is pretty well researched and detailed. However, once my brother read a Wikipedia page that said that Illinois was a Tsunami zone and he was then convinced that our house would get hit by one for the longest time. I can see how that could be terrifying news for a 6th grader at the time. Now, we joke about it all the time but it truly was a fear that Alex had for the longest time. I wonder if you have to be verified to make edits and if so, how does one go about receiving verification? I had no clue that Wikipedia had a game but I’m going to try it out some time now. The little squid is so cute.
Hey Ivy! I’m so glad you decided to write about Wikipedia, because despite years of being old that it does not provide reliable information (even proven with the 1.8 edits per second statistic) I still find myself completely trusting all of the interesting information. Learning more details about famous personal lives is very interesting. Scholastic bowl seems very interesting, I often spend my free time looking up seemingly useless, yet extremely interesting information. I’ve been to one of the scholastic bowl trivia nights and it definitely gets heated. HAHA I had no idea that an entire piece of falsified Russian history has been developed over a decade. I enjoy learning about your niche periodic interests as well, the wives of famous authors, the unknown impact that they had is fascinating. @depthsofwikipedia is truly a one of a kind account. Man oh man there is some niche information on there…whew. I just followed them. I can’t believe that you are now a true Wikipedia editor! Legendary to say the least. One of my hobby interests is history, and I am trying to get into Art History as well as Music History. Wikipedia is definitely a great jumping off place, and the linked articles are great to have some sort of dependability. I always find your blogs captivating and look forward to reading more!