About WikiSprint

WikiSprint is a free browser game about finding your way through Wikipedia. A host picks a starting article and a destination article, shares a five-character lobby code, and everyone races from one to the other using only the links inside the articles. No search box, no address bar, no shortcuts: the path you take is the whole game.

The game runs entirely in the browser. There are no accounts to make and nothing to install. Your player name lives on your own device, a lobby exists only while people are in it, and a race takes a couple of minutes, so it fits into a lunch break or the gap between two meetings.

Why it exists

The link-chasing game has been played informally for years, usually with a group of people shouting at one laptop, or with everyone opening their own tabs and arguing afterwards about who got there first. There was no easy way to run it as a real race, with a shared start, a shared clock and a verifiable path.

WikiSprint is that missing referee. It synchronises the start, counts every click, records the exact chain of articles each player travelled through, and shows the whole thing on a results screen afterwards. The interesting part of any race is not who won but the routes people found, and those routes are now worth comparing.

How it is built

Articles come straight from Wikipedia's public interface and are shown inside the race panel with their own styling, so a page looks and reads the way it does on Wikipedia. Lobbies stay in sync in real time, so you can watch other players' click counts rise while you are still hunting for a way out of a dead end.

Alongside multiplayer lobbies there is a daily challenge: one article pair, shared by everybody in the world, replaced every day at midnight UTC. It is the fastest way to play if nobody else is around.

Wikipedia and this site

WikiSprint is an unofficial fan project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation. Article text and images belong to Wikipedia's contributors and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. All of the game itself, the writing on this site, the daily challenge pairs and the guides, is original work made for WikiSprint.