Every Saturday I go to scouting. People often ask what scouts do. Well, the fun thing is that we do something different every week. Sometimes we play games, another time we do something creative and also we learn stuff like how to find your way while hiking. From the age of 15 scouts have to organize meetings themselves. Some time ago, during COVID lockdowns, scouting meetings continued, but online. It was tough to organize online meetings. Luckily, for scouting there are online databases where people share their ideas. On one of them someone posted a really nice game in which participants have to find their way through a maze, the maze being Wikipedia. Its name is the Wikipedia match. In this blog I’ll explain how the game works.
Encyclopedia
As a kid I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ place. I have always been fascinated by their collection of books, especially their printed encyclopedia. Sometimes my grandfather would take one of the books of this encyclopia from the shelf and he would show me one or more pages. My favorite page was the one about flags, because it included a lot of pictures. The encyclopia is sorted on alphabet. So, I soon knew that I had to look for the book containing the ‘v’ (from the Dutch word vlag). My grandparents still use their encyclopedia to look up information. A lot of people nowadays would, however, look up information on Wikipedia. Wikipedia.nl is an online encyclopedia. It asks people for donations, but you don’t have to pay to access the website. All the information in this online encyclopedia is for free. And it’s a lot of information. It’s one big maze.
Game instructions
The game is easy and you don’t need much stuff. All the participants only need their own computer with access to Wikipedia. They go to the same page, for example the Wikipedia page about Scouting Nederland. From this page they have to go to a different page with a totally different topic, for example the Wikipedia page about Silicon Valley. They have to do this, however, by only clicking on links within the Wikipedia pages. The person that is fastest wins.
One possible route from the page about Scouting Nederland to the page about Silicon Valley is:
Scouting Nederland – World Organization of the Scout Movement – United States – California – San Francisco – Silicon Valley
Your turn!
Are you ready for the challenge? Let’s try to find these Wikipedia pages:
How fast were you? Did you manage to find your way through the maze? Luckily, today we can meet people in real life. We can play non-online games or do a real hike in a group, which is way nicer than having to meet online. Today everything is “normal” again. Not everything is the same though as before COVID and that’s not all bad. For example, online meetings are still quiet handy when having to talk with people from the other side of the country. It saves a lot of time when not having to travel. Also, like shown in this blog, some really nice games have been invented during lockdown and they are still fun to play.
I used to play this game with friends in high school! It always felt so fun at the end realising how interconnected everything was simply by jumping through wikipedia articles.
Can be fun and interesting indeed, Wikipedia is an (almost) infinite maze. Maybe this idea could be used in a classroom, not only as a game, but as a pedagogical tool for teachers to show the students certain relations between concepts, ideas and facts…
I never played this game, but I’ve seen my younger brother and his friends do that to ‘spend time’ together during quarantine. They were timing each other to see who is the quickest one to complete the game. Personally I thought it was a waste of time, I preferred to watch movies online with my friends. But I can see why people found it interesting.