The Wikipedia Game: Boring, Pointless, or Neither?

SEAN KAMPERMAN

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When most people think about Wikipedia — the self-styled “free, Web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project” — they are likely reminded of the preliminary research they did for that term paper on post-structuralism, or of the idle minutes they may’ve spent exploring an interesting topic just for the heck of it — the neuroanatomy of purple-striped jellyfish, for example, or Jersey Shore. First and foremost a layman’s tool, Wikipedia has struggled to find legitimacy alongside more reputable reference sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica, even in spite of the outstanding quality of many of its entries. But fortunately for the makers of the Free Encyclopedia — and for the rest of us — Wikipedia’s usefulness goes far beyond its intended “encyclopedic” purpose. Under the right circumstances, it can be as much a source of entertainment as one of knowledge and self-improvement.

Opening paragraph provides a context and a subtle evaluative thesis: “Wikipedia’s usefulness goes far beyond its intended ‘encyclopedic’ purpose.”

WikiHunt is introduced as a cultural phenomenon.

A prime example of this fact is a phenomenon identified as the Wikipedia game — or, as it’s now known to users of Apple and Android smart phones, “WikiHunt.” WikiHunt is a simple game whose rules draw upon the unique architectural features of wikis, in that players perform “moves” by following the links that connect one Wikipedia entry to another. Driven by cultural conditions of dilettantism and the spurts of creativity that tend to come on in times of extreme boredom, dozens if not hundreds of Wikipedia users in high school computer labs, college dormitories, and professional workspaces around the globe have “discovered” the game on their own. Some have even gone so far as to claim sole proprietorship — as in the case of two of my friends, who swear they invented the game while sitting through a lecture on academic dishonesty. Questions of original authorship aside, the Wikipedia game would appear to be a bona fide grassroots phenomenon — and one well worth examining if we consider its possible implications for learning and education.

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Understanding that not every reader will know WikiHunt, Kamperman offers a detailed explanation.

If you’ve never played the Wikipedia game, it’s fun — educational — and, for the most part, free; indeed, all you’ll need is one or more friends, two computers, and an Internet connection. To begin, navigate to the Wikipedia homepage and click the “Random article” link on the left-hand side of the screen. As advertised, this link will lead you and your friend to two randomly generated Wikipedia articles. The objective from here is to get from your article to your opponent’s using nothing but links to other articles. These links, which appear within the text of the articles themselves, are bits of hypertext denoted in blue; click on any of them, and you’ll be instantly transported to another article and another set of links. Depending on which version of the rules you’re going by, either the player who finishes first or the one who gets to his or her opponent’s page using the fewest number of links is the winner. Easy, right?

The paper returns to its thesis when it notes how unexpectedly hard WikiHunt is.

Not exactly. What makes the Wikipedia game hard — and coincidentally, what makes it so much fun — is the vastness of the Web site’s encyclopedic content. Click the “Random article” button enough times, and you’ll see a pattern emerge: the majority of articles that pop up are short ones covering extremely obscure topics, usually having to do with something related to European club soccer. Entries such as these, labeled “orphans” for their relative paucity of length and links, in fact comprise the majority of Wikipedia articles. So the chances of you or your opponent hitting the randomly-generated-article jackpot and getting a “Jesus” or an “Adolf Hitler” — two pages with tons of links — are pretty slim. Rather, the task at hand usually requires that players navigate from orphan to orphan, as was the case in a game I played just last night with my friends David and Paige. They were unlucky enough to pull up an article on the summer village of Whispering Hills, Alberta, and I was no less unfortunate to get one on “blocking,” an old 3D computer animation technique that makes characters and objects look like they’re moving. Between these two pages, we were supplied with a total of nineteen links — they had nine doors to choose from, whereas I had ten. That’s not a lot to work with. As you can probably surmise, games like this one take more than a few idle minutes — not to mention a heck of a lot of brainpower and spontaneous strategizing.

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Kamperman uses his own experience to show precisely how WikiHunt tracks users’ processes of thought and “knowledge sets.”

Indeed, what makes the Wikipedia game interesting is that it welcomes comparison between the players’ respective strategies and methods for getting from point A to point B, highlighting differences between their thought processes and respective knowledge sets. To elaborate using the aforementioned example, I initially knew nothing about either Whispering Hills, Alberta, or “Blocking (animation).” What I did know, however, was that in order to get to Canada, I’d have to go through the good old U.S. of A. So I clicked a link at the bottom of the page entitled “Categories: animation techniques,” and from there looked for a well-known technique that I knew to be associated with an American software company. Selecting “PowerPoint animation,” I was led from there to the article on Microsoft — which, thanks to the company’s late ’90s monopolistic indiscretions, furnished me with a link to the U.S. Department of Justice. Five clicks later and I was in Alberta, looking for a passageway to Whispering Hills, one of the province’s smallest, obscurest villages. I finally found it in a series of lists on communities in Alberta — but not before my opponents beat me to the punch and got to my page on “blocking” first. David, a computer science major, had taken a different approach to clinch the win; rather than drawing upon his knowledge of a macroscopic, big-picture subject like geography, he skipped from the article on Canada to a page entitled “Canadian industrial research and development organizations,” from which he quickly bored through twelve articles on various topics in the computer sciences before falling on “Blocking (animation).” In his case, specialized knowledge was the key to winning.

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But did David and Paige really win? Perhaps — but in the wide world of the Wikipedia game, there are few hard-and-fast rules to go by. Whereas my opponents got to their destination quicker than I, my carefully planned journey down the funnel from big (“United States”) to small (“List of summer villages in Alberta”) got me to Whispering Hills using two fewer links than they. So in this example, one sees not a clear-cut lesson on how to win the game, but rather a study in contrasting styles. A player can rely on specialized knowledge, linking quickly to familiar domains and narrowing the possibilities from there; or, she/he may choose to take a slower, more methodical approach, employing abstract, top-down reasoning skills to systematically sift through broader categories of information. Ultimately, victory is possible in either case.

Its more casual, entertaining uses aside, Wikipedia gets a bad rap, especially in the classroom. Too many college professors and high school English teachers have simply written it off, some even going so far as to expressly forbid their students from using it while at school. These stances and attitudes are understandable. Teaching students how to find good sources and properly credit them is hard enough without the competing influence of the Wikipedia community, whose definition of an acceptably accurate source seems to extend not only to professionally or academically vetted articles, but to blogs as well, some obviously plagiarized. But to deny Wikipedia a place in the classroom is to deny both students and teachers alike the valuable experience of playing a game that shows us not only what we know, but how we know — how our brains work when posed with the everyday challenge of having to connect ostensibly unrelated pieces of information, and furthermore, how they work differently in that respect.

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Acknowledging reservations about Wikipedia, the paper asserts that WikiHunt shows players “how we know.”

Knowledge building is a connective or associative process, as the minds behind Wikipedia well know. A casual perusal of any Wikipedia article reveals reams and reams of blue hypertext — bits of text that, when set in isolation, roughly correspond to discrete categories of information about the world. In a sense, the visual rhetoric of Wikipedia invokes the verbal rhetoric of exploration, prompting intrepid Web-using truth seekers to go sailing through a bright blue sea of information that is exciting by virtue of its seeming limitlessness. It should comfort teachers to know that, in quickly navigating through linked knowledge categories to reach their respective destinations, Wikipedia gamers aren’t relying too much on their understanding of the articles themselves; rather, what they’re relying on is their ability to understand relationships.

Argues that WikiHunt is about learning relationships between ideas.

The fact that so many people have independently found the fun at the heart of Wikipedia should be a heads-up. The Wikipedia game is a grassroots technological innovation that sheds new light on what it means to know — and, perhaps more importantly, one that reminds us that, yes, learning can be fun. It isn’t too hard to imagine versions of the game that could be played by kids in school, and how teachers could then use the game to learn more about the stuff of their trade — namely, learning and how it works. So the next time you hear a friend, teacher, or coworker dismiss the Free Encyclopedia as “unreliable” or “unacademic,” do knowledge a favor and challenge them to the following:

Defends Wikipedia as supporting a game that proves to be about “learning and how it works.”

“Villa of Livia” to “List of Montreal Expos broadcasters” . . .

. . . no click-backs . . .

. . . twenty links or less.

Go.

Sean Kamperman wrote “The Wikipedia Game: Boring, Pointless, or Neither?” in spring 2010 for a lower-division course on rhetoric and media at the University of Texas at Austin. In his topic proposal he briefly described Wikipedia games familiar to many students and then indicated what he intended to explore: “A lot of scholars have been very critical of Wikipedia — some going so far as to discourage its use altogether, even for the purpose of gathering background info. Does the fact that games like these use Wikipedia detract from their educational value? Or do the games in some way rebut these criticisms, demonstrating that the practical uses of user-generated online encyclopedias go beyond traditional research and, by extension, considerations of factual correctness?” His paper is the answer to those questions.