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Wiki Games

Contributing to Wiki can involve short, fun activities and we have our own WikiGames site to help.

Learning through play

At the University of Edinburgh we have pulled together some short, fun activities that anyone can do as part of teaching and learning. See Wiki Games for more information.

Wiki Race

Wiki Race challenges players to get from one article to another in the shortest time using only links within pages. 

This game explores how different types of Wikipedia articles are structured and how Wikipedia links together. 

For example, get from 'Sloth' to 'Joseph Black' in four clicks.

Rules 
  • Use only the body of the text (no Categories).
  • You can use Back and Ctrl + F (to find text on a page).
  • No editing!

Further resources

Citation Hunt 

Citation Hunt is a neat tool that helps to find missing citations on Wikipedia. You can then search for an appropriate source to use to update the article.

How many citations can you fix in 10 minutes?
  1. Login to Wikipedia.
  2. Make sure you have the Visual Editor enabled.
    • Click Preferences in the menu at the top right of the screen.
    • Select the Editing tab
    • In the Editor section, uncheck Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta.
    • In Editing Mode, choose Show me both editor tabs.
  3. Go to Citation Hunt.
  4. Find a snippet that needs a citation (you can restrict the search to specific categories – type into the box under the buttons) and click I’ve got this! to open the Wikipedia page.
  5. Do some searching on the web until you find a good quality, reliable source. Remember – no fake news!
  6. Edit the Wikipedia article and click the cite button to insert a reference at the appropriate point in the article, replacing the [citation needed] text.
  7. Save the article.
  8. Go back to Citation Hunt and find another article to fix!

Further resources

The Primary Sources tool 

Try the Wikidata Game – Primary Sources. Check if  a third party source can be used a reference on a Wikidata item by clicking yes or no.

Build a visually dynamic timelines of everything in minutes

Articles in Wikipedia can contain quite a bit of structured information. For example, articles typically belong to one or more categories and many pages such as biographies or world events will contain date information.

Take a look at David Bowie’s biography page as an example.

In the Infobox on the right hand side of the page are a number of key pieces of date information, and if you scroll to the bottom of the page you will see a large number of categories.

Histropedia is a tool that builds interactive timelines using this information. For example, have a look at a timeline of women “badder than Taylor Swift“.

  1. Open Histropedia
  2. Click Start Exploring Timelines
  3. Type David Bowie into the search box at the top
  4. Select David Bowie filmography and Histropedia will build a timeline
  5. Type David Bowie into the search box again, and choose David Bowie albums
  6. Click Merge – now you have two timelines together.

 

© Ewan McAndrew and Hannah Rothmann, University of Edinburgh, 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0, unless otherwise indicated.

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