A digital encyclopaedia where you can find all human knowledge, to be browsed in vertical format with infinite scrolling that replicates the flow of content on social media. This is the idea behind WikiTok, a project created recently to merge two symbols of contemporary society. On the one hand, Wikipedia provides free and accessible knowledge for everyone; on the other, the sequence of information can be enjoyed at any moment on TikTok. An apparently strange encounter that has generated an excellent result, as demonstrated by the appreciation shared by thousands of users on X and other platforms.
Endless scrolling with randomised content
First of all, it should be clarified that WikiTok has no connection with the ByteDance app because it was a joke idea that came from some developers who were expressing their craziest ideas. The idea came from Tyler Angert, who launched the challenge by posting the following on X: ‘Idea for an absurd project: the whole of Wikipedia on a single scrolling page‘. The platform’s rebound effect struck Isaac Gemal, an app developer from New York, who quickly gave shape to WikiTok, a term coined by Angert himself to summarise the cross between Wikipedia and TikTok. The initiative was an immediate hit, with many people browsing the digital encyclopaedia that allows you to jump from history to politics, from art to law, and from geography to sport.
Accessible via desktop and mobile browsers, WikiTok appears as a vertical scrolling interface in which the flow of content is randomly organised. There are no videos, only an image in the background accompanying a short text description, which refers to the corresponding Wikipedia entry for further information. The distinctive feature of WikiTok, available in 14 languages, is the absence of an algorithm to guide the flow of information because everything is left to chance. ‘I’ve received a lot of messages from people asking for an algorithm for WikiTok, but we are governed by ruthless and opaque algorithms in our daily lives, so why can’t we have a small piece of the world without them?’ Gemal told ArsTechnica.
An open source project by Claude AI
When asked how he created WikiTok, the author then revealed that he didn’t do most of the work. ‘AI helped me realise the project very quickly and capitalise on that viral tweet’. The whole process, Gemal added, took just a few hours thanks to the use of Anthropic’s Claude and Cursor AI tools, which wrote the several hundred lines of code. In its simplicity, WikiTok encompasses several meanings. First of all, it celebrates the role played by TikTok, its popularity among large sections of the public, and its revenge on those who underestimated the app, linking it to frivolous content for an essence based on entertainment as an end in itself.
Furthermore, as emerged in the comments on the project, the impossibility of predicting the contents, combined with the possibility of expanding one’s knowledge in a familiar way that refers to the structure of social media, represents an effective and fun form of learning for many young people. What also favours the spread of WikiTok is its open-source nature, with the source code available on GitHub, allowing anyone who wants to contribute to the development of the project.
