"Wikipedia Races, But For GitHub!" ... Is this a genius idea?
Tags: discuss, github, npm, game
Published: 2020-03-20 02:33:05

---
title: "Wikipedia Races, But For GitHub!" ... Is this a genius idea?
published: true
description: ((Answer carefully bc I have a fragile self-image))
tags: discuss, GitHub, npm, game
---

I was thinking some thoughts today, and a random memory came to mind.

Many moons ago, two of my friends started a podcast where they would record themselves doing so-called "Wikipedia Races."

If this is a new term for you, then you should know that a Wikipedia Race refers to a game in which you take two wildly divergent wikipedia pages, and you then try to navigate from one to the other.

The twist is that you're only allowed to navigate using links to other wiki pages. No search. No crawlers. Just good, ole-fashioned hyperlink-clickin' fun![^1]

> Aside: It hit me while I was typing out the rules that **this game is just thinly veiled breadth-first search for humans.** Hah!

As an example, try starting from **[Spider-Man 3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man_3)** and maneuvering yourself to the page on **[Poland-US Relations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland–United_States_relations)**. There's a very intuitive solution if you think about it![^2]

The reason I bring this up is that, after thinking of Wikiraces, a truly profound thought[^3] entered my mind, which was: "**Couldn't you do a Wikipedia Race on GitHub?** Or on GitHub's new bff, NPM?? What if you tried to race from one repo to another???"

I paused for a second, and before any much-needed critical reflection could begin, I thought to myself, "Yeah! Sounds awesome! Why not?!" and I set out to tell the world about this awesome new game.

I originally had two questions for the DEV community, which you're still free to answer if you want:

  1. Would you ever play this game?

  1. **What would be some good combinations of projects** that I could try to race between on GitHub?


Now the thing is, after having written all of this down and thought about it for maybe six or seven more seconds, I'm not entirely sure if this somehow nerdier adaptation of Wikipedia Races actually sounds all-too fun.[^4]

Just think about the ways you'd have to navigate between repos:

* Cross-project mentions (in issues, PRs, comments, etc)
* Users, via their interactions (contributions, stars, etc)
* A dependency graph, if it exists

Indiscriminately clicking through GitHub users just doesn't seem as fun as a random walk through Wikipedia articles. In fact, "fun" might be an inappropriate description for either of those activities. 

That said, even though a GitHub Race is sounding less "fun" by the moment, it just so happens that I am more or less stuck in my apartment for the foreseeable future.

In addition to that, I'm noting that I just wrote a post about how excited I was to have thought up a game that I'm now almost sure would be exceedingly boring.

So, I guess if current trends continue, my threshold for "fun" may drop dramatically over the next few days.

In which case, do not be surprised if when I announce my innovative, new tech podcast next week :grin:

[^1]: My research tells me this is how people did Internet in the 90s.

[^2]: So intuitive! `Spider-Man 3 => James Franco => The Interview => CIA => Poland-United States Relations`

[^3]: Okay yeah I didn't really check if someone already thought of this. It seems very likely that someone has already thought of this.

[^4]: You don't seem surprised? _Why don't you seem surprised???_