Wiki Games

Contributing to Wiki can involve short, fun activities and we have our own WikiGames site to help.

Learning through play

At the University of Edinburgh we have pulled together some short, fun activities that anyone can do as part of teaching and learning.

Wiki Race challenges players to get from one article to another in the shortest time using only links within pages.  

This game explores how different types of Wikipedia articles are structured and how Wikipedia links together.  

For example, get from 'Sloth' to 'Joseph Black' in four clicks. 

Rules  

  • Use only the body of the text (no Categories). 

  • You can use Back and Ctrl + F (to find text on a page). 

  • No editing! 


Citation Hunt is a neat tool that helps to find missing citations on Wikipedia. You can then search for an appropriate source to use to update the article. 

How many citations can you fix in 10 minutes? 

  1. Login to Wikipedia. 

  1. Make sure you have the Visual Editor enabled. 

  1. Click Preferences in the menu at the top right of the screen. 

  1. Select the Editing tab 

  1. In the Editor section, uncheck Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta. 

  1. In Editing Mode, choose Show me both editor tabs. 

  1. Go to Citation Hunt. 

  1. Find a snippet that needs a citation (you can restrict the search to specific categories – type into the box under the buttons) and click I’ve got this! to open the Wikipedia page. 

  1. Do some searching on the web until you find a good quality, reliable source. Remember – no fake news! 

  1. Edit the Wikipedia article and click the cite button to insert a reference at the appropriate point in the article, replacing the [citation needed] text. 

  1. Save the article. 

  1. Go back to Citation Hunt and find another article to fix! 


Check if  a third party source can be used a reference on a Wikidata item by clicking yes or no.


Further resources

© Ewan McAndrew and Hannah Rothmann, University of Edinburgh, 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0, unless otherwise indicated.

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