Like all encyclopedias, online or offline, Wikipedia is absolutely chock-full of information. So much so that it can feel overwhelming if you fall down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. However, what if there was a way of consuming Wikipedia in a more digestible manner?
WikiTok: A Better Way of Exploring Wikipedia
WhileWikipediareceives a lot of criticism (some deserved and some not), it’s still a fantastic way to learn about the world. After all, it’s a fully loaded encyclopedia, online, and completely free to use. What’s not to love? However, Wikipedia can be so overloaded with information that it’s often difficult to digest.
That’s why I’ve been searching for a better way to get to grips with Wikipedia’s vast troves of information—and I’ve finally found the solution.
It’s called WikiTok, a simple tool that combines the wealth of information available on Wikipedia withthe simple and effective UI of TikTok. Hence, the name, which, as you may have spotted, is a portmanteau of Wikipedia and TikTok.
Wikipedia offers several ways to cut through the noise and find interesting articles. Its stellar search function, featured articles, and current-events-related articles are on the homepage, and there’s even aRandom Articlebutton. But WikiTok is just what I’ve been looking for. It eliminates all of the extra steps and helps me read more than ever.
How to Use WikiTok to Explore Wikipedia
Using WikiTok is as simple as navigating to the WikiTok site and scrolling down. That’s it! Go toWikitok.vercel.app, and you’ll land on a random Wikipedia article. Often, these will be very random, to the point that you may not even understand the context.
You’ll be able to read the excerpt laying out the basics of the topic, with an option toRead More. Clicking will transport you to the full Wikipedia article if you want to explore the topic more fully. Once you’re done, scroll down to the next article.
Beyond that, you can tap theHeart iconto like an article or tap theShare iconto copy the link to share elsewhere. Liked articles are collected in a list that can be accessed at the top-right of the screen, and you can export the list as a JSON file.
What I Learned From Using WikiTok
Having used WikiTok every day for several weeks, I have learned stuff I would never have learned otherwise. Some of them I would have been happy remaining ignorant of, but there are others I’m very pleased to have stumbled upon.
Isaac Gemel, who is the brains behind WikiTok, claims that the articles you land on will be random, too, tellingArs Technicathat no algorithm is involved. This explains how I went from reading about a second baseman for the New York Mets to reading about the membrane separating the brain’s left and right ventricles.
I also learned a little about a professional footballer called Jimmy Bowie, the origin of the phrase, “Survival of the fittest,” and the English nursery rhyme, “Oranges and Lemons.” I could spend all day listing the things I learned from using WikiTok, but the point is to demonstrate how WikiTok will help you learn a lot of interesting (and not so-interesting) facts.
Why I Can’t Get Enough of WikiTok
Since discovering WikiTok, I have checked it at least once a day. It has an addictive quality in exactly the same way as TikTok. If one entry is of no interest, just scroll down until you find one that does. But even Wikipedia entries of little interest can still educate, inform, and entertain.
WikiTok isn’t the only option here, either. Another solid effort to make the whole of Wikipedia scrollable in TikTok’s style isWikTok. If anything, this is a visually slicker proposition, but it’s also a little muddier because it adds ways to organize the content. Whereas WikiTok (with the extrai) keeps things pure.
If neither of these appeal, why not try one of thesefun games based on Wikipedia?
