According to Wikipedia, ‘Depths of Wikipedia’ is a social media project dedicated to highlighting the unusual and entertaining facts from the platform. Annie Rauwerda started it in 2020 and has even performed live comedy shows based on the things she found.
Considering there are over seven million articles on the English version of the encyclopedia alone, she’s probably not going to run out of material any time soon as well. And since it’s open source, everyone gets to contribute to the madness.
If you’re a fan of rabbit holes, this place is like a never ending tunnel, full of nooks and crannies.
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At the time when Rauwerda launched ‘Depths of Wikipedia,’ she was a sophomore at the University of Michigan.
“Wikipedia is the best thing on the internet,” she told The New York Times. “It’s what the internet was supposed to be. It has this hacker ethos of working together and making something.”
At first, only her friends were following the account, but it received a lot of attention when Rauwerda posted about the influencer Caroline Calloway, who was upset that the post featured an old version of her Wikipedia page that said her occupation was “nothing.”
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Her followers often pitch her Wikipedia pages they think are worthy of a feature, but these days it’s hard to find an entry that will impress Rauwerda.
“If it’s a fun fact that’s been on the Reddit home page, I’m definitely not going to repost it,” she said.
“For example, there are only 25 blimps in the world. I’ve known about that for a long time, and it went around Twitter [for days]. I was shocked [when it was sent to me]. I was like, ‘Everyone knows this.'”
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Rauwerda’s account “makes the internet feel smaller,” Heather Woods, an assistant professor of rhetoric and technology at Kansas State University also told the outlet.
“It shortcuts the rabbit-hole phenomenon by offering attractive — or sometimes hilariously unattractive — entry points to internet culture.”
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In another interview, Rauwerda said rabbit holes are pretty much unavoidable if you want to understand a subject. “Everything is better when you know more about it. I didn’t like hockey for a long time, but then it became interesting to me once I knew about the players and the history of the sport.”
“I was studying neuroscience and I would wonder how I was possibly going to memorize these random proteins and enzymes. But if you dive in more than you have to, then that contextualizes and adds color in a way that helps you understand it on a different level.”
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According to her, the same is true with the internet. “If you’re scrolling through social media, you’re probably gleaning a bunch of fun and interesting surface-level content. But when you’re digging through these murky backwaters, researching backstories, looking at old newspaper archives, or just visiting odd, old archived web pages that haven’t been viewed by very many eyes, that’s really fun,” the woman behind Depths of Wikipedia said.
“It feels like treasure hunting: the internet is just so unfathomably large, and there are so many corners of it that haven’t really been explored in a long time. And to me, that’s very exciting.”
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Rauwerda said part of why there are so many Easter eggs on Wikipedia is that the contributors are very diligent and driven primarily by passion. After all, they aren’t getting paid for their work, so “they just [write and] edit the things that they think are interesting.”
As an example, she mentioned a guy from Seattle who has created dozens—maybe hundreds—of articles about different interstates in the American Northwest.
In the Middle Ages, we had monks who wrote by hand in monasteries, copying religious texts and classical literature onto parchment using quills and ink. Now, we have Wikipedians!
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Guess the song!
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Imagine if you devoted your life to calculating pi, toiled hours a day for YEARS until you the end of your life. and it turns out 20 years ago you were off by one and everything after that was basically a waste
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