Strategy guide

Climb, cross, descend

Almost every fast route has the same three phases. You climb from your starting article to something much more general, you cross sideways between two general topics, and then you descend towards the destination. Beginners try to walk sideways at the bottom of the tree, hopping between equally narrow articles, and that is why they take twenty clicks instead of six.

Before your first click, ask two questions. What broad family does the start belong to? What broad family does the destination belong to? The route is whatever connects those two families.

Hub articles

A hub is an article with an enormous number of outgoing links. Countries are the strongest hubs on Wikipedia: the United States, Germany, India and China connect to history, politics, sport, music, science, war and geography all from one page. Centuries and decades are nearly as good, and so are World War II, Christianity, Latin, Physics and London.

If you feel lost, getting to any hub is almost always progress, even when it looks like a detour. From a hub you can reach most of the encyclopedia in two or three clicks. From a small biography you can reach almost nothing.

Category climbing

Every topic sits inside a chain of increasingly general categories. A specific butterfly is an insect, which is an animal, which is biology. A ska band is a music genre, which is music, which is culture, which is a country's culture. Climbing that chain is reliable because the lead sentence of an article almost always names the next step up: "X is a species of Y", "X is a town in Z".

The lead sentence is therefore the single most valuable line on the page. Read it, take the broadest noun in it, click that.

Infobox shortcuts

The box on the right of many articles is a dense table of the most important links on the page: country, era, parent organisation, successor, genre, family, capital. It skips the prose entirely. On people, it gives nationality and occupation. On places, country and region. On species, the full biological chain in one column. When the article is long, go to the infobox first.

Reading a page in three seconds

• Lead sentence: what kind of thing is this, and what is it part of?
• Infobox: country, date, category, related entities.
• Section headings: History, Geography and Culture are the widest exits.
• Ignore references, further reading and external links entirely; they never help.

Knowing when to turn back

A page with few links, or a page whose links are all more specific than itself, is a dead end. The cost of retreating is one click. The cost of scrolling a long dead end hoping for a rescue link is often ten or fifteen seconds, which is far worse in a close race. Set yourself a rule: if the lead and the infobox give you nothing broader, go back immediately.

Racing against people, not the clock

In a lobby you can see other players' click counts moving. If someone is racing ahead, taking a risky shortcut is worth it, because second place pays nothing. If you are ahead, take the safe, boring route through a hub you know well. Speed comes from certainty far more often than from cleverness.

Finally, build a personal set of trusted hubs, five or six articles you know link almost everywhere, and practise reaching them from anywhere. Most experienced players are not smarter about Wikipedia, they simply have a home base.