On getting weird with Wikipedia…

I love Wikipedia — as a useful shared resource of the knowledge commons, yes, but also as a big open project with lots of weird bits and meta quirks, and as a fount of inspiration for adjacent projects.

Which…maybe these all amount to the same thing! Anyway here are a few favorite parts of Wikipedia, and some related project ideas.

Wikipedia "vital articles"

Here's one cool thing maintained by Wikipedia: Vital Articles , a list of what they consider their most important article topics, with five different levels in increasing orders of magnitude.

It's fun to browse this progressively more exhaustive set of lists, starting with super broad articles like "earth" and "science", and later specific people, buildings, objects, subfields, theories.

Idea: Wiki Wiki Wow!

An idea for a podcast that consists of reading particularly cool and interesting Wikipedia articles out loud — a way for others to discover and learn about highly curated concepts.

It could even be layered or iteratively expanded: start with a summary (skip the boring parts), then a dramatic reading of an article in its entirety, then with added commentary, then with multiple people in dialogue on the topic.

I've found so many weird cool concepts on Wikipedia; this would be one way to share them…other than time, a big reason I never tried making this is I personally don't much like podcasts lol.

Personal encyclopedia / idea canon

Combining the idea of a personal canon with that of a corpus of concepts, including but not limited to the aforementioned list of favorite Wikipedia articles.

A number of years ago I made a personal canon and included a few Wikipedia articles. But I actually have a much bigger list of concepts I've encountered, many with their own Wiki articles.

Still on my to do list to publish this collection somewhere! And it'd bring some fun opportunies for personal tagging / taxonomies.

Idea: Wikipoetry

Random idea I haven't explored, but: it'd be fun to trawl Wikipedia, draw phrases and interesting bits from lots of different articles, and weave them together into some imagined / invented new articles!

Great Wikipedia lists

Wikipedia has so many great lists, both articles that are themselves list-based, and meta-lists used to organize other articles. I made an Arena collection of favorites I've found.

Linguistic example sentences, humourous units of measurements, English words without rhymes, films featuring time loops, unsolved problems…

Also meta ones like "good articles" or "unusual articles"; " list of lists of lists " is a particularly good one.