wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage
A virtual arcade cabinet featuring various wiki-themed games
For Wikipedia's 25th birthday, I'm sharing Wiki Arcade, a virtual directory of wiki-powered games made by amazing people.
🕹️ playwiki.games
"What an unprocessed photo looks like", a great look at processing a RAW image, by Maurycyz
maurycyz.com/misc/raw_pho...
Looking out the left side of a passenger aircraft. The wing is visible with the Finnair logo at the tip. Above is the night sky with aurora borealis, with vertical streaks of green light and purple hues going across the sky.
Looking out the left side of a passenger aircraft. The wing is visible with the Finnair logo at the tip. Above is the night sky with aurora borealis, with vertical streaks of green light and purple hues going across the sky.
On a flight from Helsinki to JFK and noticed the northern lights while north of Iceland (first time seeing them!). Took my camera out and I'm quite happy with these ~2 second hand-held exposures ✈️🌌
If I recall correctly, Vogue Taiwan's YouTube channel had been freely licensing their videos, so they were able to be screenshotted and uploaded to Commons. But Vogue did not intend to freely license their videos so they ended up being deleted ;(
Attention Bryan fans!! There's a group of Wikipedians called WikiPortraits that takes portraits of public figures and navigates press passes. Volunteer with them if you want to support more Bryans or be your own Bryan! website is wikiportraits.org and the account to follow is @wikiportraits.org
October 1st to 31st, Wiki Loves Monuments in the United States 2025. Photo by MichaeldDPhotos, CC BY-SA 4.0
ONE DAY LEFT for #WikiLovesMonuments in the United States! Help document history and improve Wikipedia by contributing your photos of historic sites.
Ten photos will be selected to win a prize and go on to the international competition! 🌍
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons...
October 1st to 31st, Wiki Loves Monuments in the United States 2025. Photo by MichaeldDPhotos, CC BY-SA 4.0
#WikiLovesMonuments 2025 has started in the U.S.! 📸 Through October, help document history and improve Wikipedia by contributing your photos of historic sites.
Ten photos will be selected to win a prize and go on to the international competition! 🌍
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons...
A photo of Kevin Payravi holding a Mandazi in one hand, and a phone displaying the Wikipedia article about Mandazi in the other.
Back in 2009, I wrote one of my earliest Wikipedia articles on Mandazi, a form of fried bread from Eastern Africa. Now that I'm in Kenya for #Wikimania, I finally got to try it for the first time!
WikiAsteroids Image shows a video console with a screen, joystick, and six yellow, red, and blue buttons along with game graphics reading "Mean Girls", "Private Inventory", and "Ken (unit)" on the left. Main text says: Ever been crushed by a Wikipedia article that is hurtling through space? Now you can be, thanks to WikiAsteroids, a chaotic retro game where real-time activity on Wikipedia becomes asteroids and powerups.
What if every Wikipedia edit spawned an asteroid?
At this year’s SXSW in Austin, Texas, US, visitors to the Wikihaus got to find out thanks to a playful, community-built project that turns real-time edits into an old-school arcade game. 🧵⬇️ (1/5)
Surprised this was up for grabs. starwarsweb.net now redirects to cia.gov (and I'm now the proud owner of a former CIA property 😈)
A Turkish restaurant sign that says "BALIK DÜRÜMCÜ MURAT USTA". In the middle is a photo of a man dressed like Mario from the Super Mario franchise, with a red cap marked "M", red shirt, and blue apron. The apron reads "Murat the Fisherman" and features a cartoon of Mario holding a fish wrap.
An illuminated Turkish restaurant sign that says "HÜR SÜPER MARIO Restaurant."
Fine dining in Istanbul
📺 Just released by the BBC: a powerful video on the mission of the Internet Archive & the Wayback Machine.
“A time machine for the web,” preserving everything from lost government websites to books & records—before they vanish.
🔗 Explore: web.archive.org
🎥 Watch ⬇️ youtu.be/jh98N46DM5k
Normally not much of a browser plugins guy, but as someone who occasionally looks up video game things online, this one's been very nice. addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo...
Passport check has always been the norm (don't want to show up on the other side without it!). Facial recognition has been rolling out over the last few years and is now quite normal.
Another idea someone suggested to me was focused on the positive. If you're logged into Wikipedia, you could automatically send a "thanks" to the editor of each asteroid you blow up. Or, picking up a powerup from a new user registration could send them a welcome message on their talk page.
It's not like, super useful, since other bots and patrol tools would also pick up those edits, but it could still be a fun option for more lighthearted patrolling.
There are existing scoring models that can be used for this, though I'm not sure if they are currently surfaced via event streams.
Making the game "useful" has been on the back of my mind! I've been thinking about vandal patrol. Edits likely to be vandalism could appear differently (e.g. asteroid is red, faster, etc.), and those edits can be logged separately so the user can investigate afterwards.
Do you like #wikipedia? Do you like olde timey arcade games? Or, do you just like it when people do cool things on the Internet? (A sort of dying art...)
Wrote a Diff post about WikiAsteroids (asteroids.wiki), discussing the creation of the game and arcade cabinet that debuted during SXSW, as well as the various games and visualizations that have come before.
diff.wikimedia.org/2025/03/18/w...
Try this game @payravi.dev cooked up when I said “Facts should occupy more physical space in our lives” at recent conference on credibility, trust, and verifiability. If you make arcade cabinets get at us about building out a WikiArcade!
A man angrily slamming his hand against a desk repeatedly
200% tariffs on European wine?
Arrêtez-vous un moment pour apprécier la meilleure réutilisation de Wikipédia EVER 🚀 💥 🪨 asteroids.wiki
WikiAsteroids dev here, love that! Thank you for your service 🫡
Yay! Was likely outdated cache before
WikiAsteroids game over screen, showing the final asteroid of Elena Garro
Added! :)
my friend kevin just made this game where real-time wikipedia edits are astroids that you have to shoot!!!! when someone creates a new article you get an extra life, and a big astroid mean it was a big wikipedia edit (like that "kids bop 3" one)
asteroids.wiki
amazing!
