The English version of Wikipedia has almost seven million articles, and the Spanish edition has crossed the two million mark. The potential for learning something new is truly enormous, but its interface is quite “formal”, and the random article option is too well hidden. The WikiTok project by developer Isaac Gemal invites us to explore Wikipedia’s content by applying TikTok’s dynamics, with a “random” article for each vertical swipe.
While the entire world debates the future of TikTok (and the rest of social networks too), we must recognize that its vertical swipe mechanism is not necessarily “the” problem. Needless to say, its general design aims to maximize the user’s time on the platform, but if we remove its toxic aspects (manipulative algorithms, tendency to doomscrolling, etc.), the idea of exploring truly random content doesn’t sound so bad. That’s how we arrive at WikiTok, a project by developer Isaac Gemal. Would you like to try a “TikTok for Wikipedia”?
WikiTok: “TikTokifying” Wikipedia
No accounts, no algorithms, no telemetry. Once you enter the page, all you need to do is a vertical swipe to receive a new article, accompanied by a brief summary and one of its images in the background. Want to know more? Click on “Read More”, and that link will take you to the original article. There are also options to mark articles as favorites and share them on different platforms. WikiTok in Spanish? The “Language” menu is in the upper right corner.
Politics, geography, cinema, video games, science, famous people, athletes... in a few minutes I’ve seen a bit of everything. The experience is a bit more complete in the English language version due to the enormous number of available articles, but don’t let that stop you. As I said before, one of the best things we can do on Wikipedia is to get lost, and WikiTok doesn’t interfere with that, but quite the opposite.
Official site: Click here
