The Wikipedia Game

Andrew Keen hates Wikipedia. Actually, he uses the word "loathe" when asked about the website on The Colbert Report. He has a point to hate it. There are no editors, there are no gatekeepers. There is no reason for me to believe that Wikipedia's plot synopsis of Faulkner's "The Bear" is accurate. It does seem a little odd that Spider-Man's Wikipedia page is roughly the same size of Calvin Coolidge's. Though all of this might be true, Wikipedia has become an indispensable tool for every day information gathering. And fun.

There's a game I like to play with my friends called "The Wikipedia Game." You pick a random article by clicking on "random article." Then in a new tab/window, you pick another random article, again by clicking "random article." The point of the game is to get from the second random article to the first random article only by clicking hyperlinks within the article that lead to other Wikipedia articles.

EXAMPLE?

Destination article: "Odrowąż, Lesser Poland Voivodeship."
Start article: "Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin."

Here's the route I took:

Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin (start!)
Washington D.C.
United States
Invasion of Poland
Second Polish Republic
Administrative division of Second Polish Republic
Gmina
List of Polish Gminas
Gmina Czarny Dunajec
(and finally,)
Odrowąż, Lesser Poland Voivodeship.

You can check my work, if you want. It's all there. You can win either by getting their first, or by getting there in the least amount of pages. This has to be decided on before you play (duh). There's some strategy involved, but I'll leave you to figure that shit out for yourself. You'll never get anywhere if you don't work for it.

Fun game, right?

But, like all things, if you stop to think about it for a second, it becomes much more peculiar. The first chapter of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death talks about media as a metaphor. "In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself," he says.

If we take this to be true, then that means the Wikipedia game has an idea embedded in it that goes beyond its function (wasting time). Why is Wikipedia such an indispensable tool for information? Because it contains an open and free public source of a lot of information. The game requires you to skim through information to get you to links that will take you to another source of information which you then skim in order to get to more information. You don't actually absorb any of the information you look at, but rather, you simply use it as a tool to get wherever you need to be.

The game is a highly condensed metaphor to how we live our lives today. Quick and easy access in order to get to our destination, be it Odrowąż or the end of a paper for school. If you boil it down even further, Wikipedia is information, and the Wikipedia game is a past time. If you look at all of our Wikipedia usage as a more disjointed version of the game, then information becomes a pastime.

Huh.