Do you ever get really, really, REALLY distracted?

After slinging boxes around all morning and afternoon yesterday (we’re in the middle of a move) I sat down in the early evening with the intention of working on a way to explore similarity between Wikipedia pages using their member categories. I actually got pretty far but then I got this idea itching in my mind. It kept bothering me until I had to scratch on it, so I went and worked on it for a while and ended up with Wiki Stack Game ( http://wikistackgame.com/ )

Wiki Stack Game starts you off with a big handful of random words. Your objective is to add words to a Wikipedia search with the goal of making the query as long as possible while still getting results.

You lose when you add that one word that breaks the search and gets you zero results. Your score depends on the number of words you added and the length of the final Wikipedia article in the search before it breaks. And if the Wikipedia article looks interesting you can go visit it!

Right now the “random” words are limited to sets in the program. I’m not getting them via an API or anything. I thought about using Doug Beeferman’s excellent Datamuse API to get the words but I’m not sure how to integrate the “rare” factor of the nouns. At any rate, a limited word set is the biggest problem with the game right now and I’ll work on it.

I’m having fun playing it. It’s satisfying to try to figure out what word is likely to be in the remaining search results or whether you should adopt the strategy of crashing your search once you find a really long page name and rack up your score that way. I’m not really a game maker so I’m surprised and pleased this turned out.