Once up a time, it was fun to hit up Wikipedia, choose a random page, and go link-hopping. Now, with shorter attention spans, there’s no time for that sort of thing. The answer? Xikipedia, a reworking of the popular online encyclopedia that renders the pages into a sort of social media feed.
Xikipedia replicates the sort of thing you’d find on X, Threads, or even (if you have the correct tastes) BlueSky… but without any of the trolling, memes, and general negativity you’ll find on those platforms. Our first look at the reworking gave us immediate access to Joe Pesci, and the world could always use more Joe Pesci.
Sick of social media? Try Xikipedia
It’s not a complete project, of course. You can’t download an app that’ll serve up random facts from Wikipedia and expect it to remain static. The project’s description states that “Xikipedia is a pseudo social media feed that algorithmically shows you content from Simple Wikipedia. It is made as a demonstration of how even a basic non-ML algorithm with no data from other users can quickly learn what you engage with to suggest you more similar content. No data is collected or shared here, the algorithm runs locally and the data disappears once you refresh or close the tab.”
Which is… about what we experienced when we took a look. Tag a few of the hearts in the bottom right of each ‘post’, and the page will begin showing you connected events. In our case, tagging the WWE’s 2005 Backlash event led to the TCL: Tables, Ladders, Chairs event from 2013, followed by Vengeance, No Way Out, the Royal Rumble… you get the idea.
It’s an interesting thing to play around with and, provided you don’t just like the sort of items giving you seasonal affective depression (making you SAD, in other words), it’s a welcome diversion from scrolling through the other sort of algorithm. Xikipedia… might even have potential as a complete all. We expect someone is already vibe-coding the app as we type this.
