Wikiracing

Possibly the best sport ever, wikiracing has established itself in my mind as the perfect social celebration of one's nerdiness. Basically, you pick two random pages on Wikipedia and race other people from one to the other, using links to other Wikipedia pages. It's fun and surprisingly educational, at least in the pub trivia sense of the word. I've unfortunately only managed to engage in one official set of wikiraces, complete with the entirely embarrassing experience of an old friend walking over halfway through and innocently asking what we were doing.

I took the first race- evidently my prior training at home helped- from the 1974-75 Toronto Maple Leafs Season (ice hockey) to the Macanga District, a stub article about a tiny district in Mozambique. My friend took the next four, including memorable races from George Brent Mickum IV to List of Farscape Episodes, and from Killeen Independent School District to List of cities in the Americas with alternative names, a particularly devilish article to pin down. I took another two after that, re-establishing some geek cred with the final trek from Soki, a type of Japanese pork dish, to Laudakia Caucasia, a reptile native to central Asia. So I lost the seven rounder 3-4, and have temporarily bowed down to my opponent's superior wikiracing skill.

Now there are, of course, many dry details that I have not included here, such as the method of deciding which pages are used, the time allowed to study the goal page before you begin, and exactly what features of Wikipedia are allowed (the search function, for example, is obviously illegal). Of greater interest are the strategies that developed:

1. Geography is the easiest way to get between disparate articles. Most articles link to a country page, and from there it is a simple matter to follow diplomatic and geographic links to any other country, from which one can narrow back down again.
2. Categories are gold mines. Knowing what categories the target article belongs to makes the process a whole lot easier.
3. Actually knowing stuff can also help. In some situations.

At the end of the day it's simply fun. Play it, enjoy it, tell your friends: I yearn for the day when I can proudly answer the questions, 'what are you doing in your lunch break?', 'how did you study for that course?' and 'what are you doing on your first date?' all with one word: Wikiracing.