Wikipedia Speedrun — How to Play and Get Faster

A Wikipedia speedrun is a race through Wikipedia itself. You start on one article — say, Volcano — and try to reach a target article — say, Taylor Swift — using nothing but the links inside each page. No search bar, no address bar, no categories. Just you, the article in front of you, and the paths you can see through it.

The game goes by many names: wiki race, wikirace, wiki speedrun, or simply the Wikipedia game. People have been playing it in computer labs and dorm rooms since the 2000s. What makes it a speedrun is the scoreboard: you're racing the clock, the click counter, or another player.

There are two classic ways to win, and every serious player tracks both:

• Fewest clicks — reach the target in as few link hops as possible. This rewards knowledge of how Wikipedia is wired together.
• Fastest time — reach the target before anyone else, regardless of route length. This rewards fast reading and decisive clicking.

On Wikiracer, both metrics are first-class: every finished run shows your clicks and your time next to the route's optimal click count, which we compute by searching Wikipedia's actual link graph. If the optimal path is 3 clicks and you did it in 3, you speedran it perfectly — now do it faster.

• Daily Challenge — one fixed route per day, the same for every player in the world. The purest speedrun format: identical seed, global leaderboard, streaks for consistency.
• Custom Route — pick any two articles (or let us generate a pair) and race between them. The free-choice category: practice specific routes, hunt personal bests, or challenge a friend to beat your run.
• Showdown — ranked 1v1. You and an opponent get the same route at the same moment; fastest to the target wins and climbs the league ladder.

Every strong Wikipedia speedrunner leans on hub articles — pages so densely linked that almost anything is reachable from them in a click or two. Countries (United States, France, Japan), broad topics (World War II, Music, Science), and big cities are the highways of Wikipedia. The classic pattern is up, across, down: climb from your start article to a hub, cross to the hub nearest your target's domain, then descend through increasingly specific links.

A few example routes to build intuition (each arrow is one click):

Two more habits that shave seconds: read the first paragraph and the infobox first (they hold the highest-value links), and before you click, ask what the target's article probably links from — thinking backwards from the destination is often faster than pushing forwards from the start.

• Defamation → Instagram · 2 clicks · easy
• 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami → Russo-Ukrainian war · 2 clicks · easy
• Empire State Building → Rock and roll · 2 clicks · easy
• Battle of Tours → Apollo · 2 clicks · easy
• Chernobyl disaster → Battle of Stalingrad · 2 clicks · easy

Browse the full route explorer

Wikiracer is free, runs in your browser, and doesn't require an account to try. Today's daily route is waiting, or generate a custom route and start clicking.

See also: Wiki Race · Wikipedia Games