Retrieve a random Wikipedia page | Hacker News Reader

Retrieve a random Wikipedia page

en.wikipedia.org

19 points1vuio0pswjnm713 comments

This has been a link on the Wikipedia sidebar for as long as I can remember.

I thought there had been more past threads but these are all I can find. Others?

Wikipedia Random Article (has gotten weird) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273917 - May 2020 (3 comments)

Experiment HN: If you end up with anything interesting, post the link - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7758508 - May 2014 (73 comments)

Edit: I did find this:

Microscale – turn random Wikipedia articles into music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15958625 - Dec 2017 (25 comments)

I prefer this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RandomInCategory/Good_...

you can also do a random featured article, which is a higher standard than the "good articles" category:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RandomInCategory/Featu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles

> Featured articles are considered to be some of the best articles Wikipedia has to offer, as determined by Wikipedia's editors. They are used by editors as examples for writing other articles. Before being listed here, articles are reviewed as featured article candidates for accuracy, neutrality, completeness, and style according to our featured article criteria. Most featured articles were previously good articles (which are reviewed with a less restrictive set of criteria). There are 6,023 featured articles out of 6,400,532 articles on the English Wikipedia (about 0.09% or one out of every 1,060 articles). Articles that no longer meet the criteria can be proposed for improvement or removal at featured article review.

There is also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RandomRedirect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomrootpage

I'm also a fan of using Wikipedia for a quick look at international news. Feels much less sensationalized than news papers do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

A fun exercise I did every day for a month was to take a (longish) random article and summarize 2 or 3 paragraphs of it (usually around 180 words), trying to make it as short as I could without losing the true meaning/purpose of those paragraphs.

Very good exercise to attempt in new language that one is learning too

Doing the random page in a different language as a strategy for language learning is fun method itself to improve reading comprehension

Consider writing for Wikipedia

A fun game you can do using this is picking two random pages, and get from one to the other in the least steps possible / as fast as possible.

Hard rules:

Lists (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_advertising_c...) can't be navigated to

Back button can't be used (click wisely)

Additional rule:

Ctrl+F banned

A tiny bit off topic... but I semi-randomly look up W articles on a topic that comes to mind out of the blue. I’ve found great stuff this way. One that comes to mind is the page on the band Bachman Turner Overdrive. Insanely random luck led to their success. Often there’s a back story to so much that affects our lives

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachman–Turner_Overdrive

Ok, who's spying on me here?

I opened the link for the very first time and I kid you not, I land on a Polish municipality: Lipiny, Ciechanów County

I'm Polish.

That thing scares me...

Credit: @jfengel

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