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Welcome to PlayTheWiki

A game built on real Wikipedia articles.

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No account needed to start.

What the game is

You play a character in a 3D city. Every building in the city is a real Wikipedia article, loaded live from the wiki that you can click to open to read and have access to the article game experience. You walk around, take missions from NPCs, read and edit real articles, and fight monsters in dungeons built from the articles' own problems.

Completing things gives you WikiCoins and XP. WikiCoins are the game's currency: you spend them in the shop on gear, boots, wings, teleports, skins and potions. XP raises your level, which unlocks stronger items and changes your avatar.

Reading missions

Reading missions are about learning. Here is the whole flow:

1. Walk the city until you find a Reading NPC — a robed figure holding a book, marked ✨📖.
2. Click it. Choose 1 to 3 subjects you want to read about.
3. The NPC gives you 3 articles.
4. Find each one in the city. The article is a building somewhere on the map. Clicking it marks that article as Found.
5. Read it. Open the Read tab on the building and spend at least 30 seconds there, then press Mark as read.
6. Go back to any Reading NPC and confirm it. You are shown three short excerpts and have to pick the one that is really from that article. Get it right and the article is done.
7. Get it wrong and that article resets — you have to find it and read it again, and the next attempt uses a different excerpt. After 4 wrong attempts the article drops out of the mission.
8. When all 3 articles are confirmed, you choose: collect the mission rewards and go back to the city, or enter a special dungeon with three reward doors and take the bigger prize.

Edit missions

Edit missions are about contributing. The edit is made on Wikipedia itself, by you, from your own account.

1. Link your Wikimedia account, once. The game only asks who you are — it never edits anything on your behalf.
2. Find an Edit NPC in the city — same idea as the Reading NPC, but marked ✨✏️ with a quill.
3. Pick your subjects. The NPC gives you 3 articles that need work.
4. Find the article in the city and open it. You can see what it is missing: no sources, no images, too short, not updated in years.
5. Edit it on Wikipedia. The game sends you to the article and stays out of the way.
6. Come back and tell the game you edited it. It checks your Wikipedia contributions and confirms the edit really exists.
7. Then it waits 48 hours. This is the important part: the reward is held.
8. After 48 hours the game checks again. If your edit was not reverted, you get the WikiCoins and XP. If the community reverted it, you get nothing for that article.

How much a mission gives

An edit mission has a base amount of WikiCoins. On top of that:

• +20% if your edit added a source (a reference).
• +15% if you added a new section.
• +50 WikiCoins the first time you ever edit that particular article.
• +10% for each Knowledge Fragment you used. Fragments drop around the city and in dungeons; each one is a hint about what a specific article is missing ("this article has no images", "paragraph 2 needs a citation"). Using a fragment on the article it belongs to raises what that edit gives.

So an edit that adds a sourced new section to an article you have never touched gives the base, plus 35% of it, plus 50.

Later on this will get finer: adding a source or cleaning up bad content will be worth more than fixing spacing, because those are the things articles need most. Right now every edit uses the same base.

Translation missions

1. Say which languages you read and write.
2. The game compares two Wikipedias and shows you what exists in one language and is missing in the other.
3. Pick one and claim it.
4. Translate it on Wikipedia.
5. Same as edit missions: the game confirms the edit, holds it for 48 hours, and releases the WikiCoins if it survived.

The city

• Every building is a real article, streamed from the wiki as you walk. The city keeps loading around you — there is no edge to reach.
• Click a building to open the article: read it, see how good the article is rated, see what it is missing.
• Filters let you show only what you are looking for — only stubs, only articles with no image, only articles created before 2005, only ones you have not touched yet. Everything else dims out.
• Other cities — each language and subject area is its own city, reached from the travel desk.
• My Journey is your own map: every article you have worked on, in one place.
• Fast travel — bus stops, airports and ports move you across the map instead of walking.
• Events — real campaign events from the wiki appear in the city as portals you can enter.

Dungeons and combat

• A dungeon is generated from an article's own weaknesses. A badly sourced article produces different monsters than an unillustrated one.
• Monsters are the article's problems — Citation Wraiths, Stub Sprites, Reference Phantoms, the Imageless, the Outdated, the Untranslated.
• Fighting is turn-based. You attack, the monster attacks. Your gear decides how hard you hit and how much you survive.
• Knowledge Strike costs 20 KP (Knowledge Points) and hits for 2.5× a normal attack. KP is limited, so you choose when to use it.
• Quizzes appear mid-dungeon, taken from the article you are inside. Answering all of them correctly doubles the WikiCoins from that run.
• Boss portals appear around the city at random and lead to harder fights with better drops.
• Multiplayer — you can run a dungeon with other players at the same time.
• Dying is not the end: you keep what you collected and go back to the city.

The shop

Spend WikiCoins on:

• Equipment — 187 items across head, glasses, body, back, gloves, legs, feet, accessory and weapons, in five rarities. They raise strength, defence, HP, KP and how fast you move.
• Boots — hold Shift to sprint. Without boots, Shift does nothing.
• Wings — fly over the city with Space to go up and Ctrl to come down.
• Shortcuts — a permanent +1 speed upgrade applied to the boots or wings you already wear.
• Potions and brews — heal HP, restore KP, or give temporary strength, defence or speed. Active effects show on your HUD with a countdown.
• Teleports — one-shot items that take you straight to a travel desk.
• Bonus gear — items that give +X% XP or +X% WikiCoins on everything you do.
• Skins — change how your avatar looks, in the city and in dungeons.

Progression

• Levels — XP raises your level. Higher levels unlock better items and change your avatar's look.
• Badges for milestones.
• Healing devices that level up: the same potion heals more as the device improves.
• Chests and boss drops give gear you did not buy.

Playing without an account

You can start playing immediately, with no account. The game tells you you are a guest and that guest progress can be lost. When you link a Wikimedia account, everything you did as a guest is carried over — you do not start again. You need the account linked before an edit mission can be validated, because the game has to know which Wikipedia user made the edit.

Coming next

Not in the game yet:

• Create-article missions — write an article that does not exist yet. How much it gives depends on how good the finished article is, judged by the same automatic grading the wiki already uses.
• Claim past contributions — have edits you already made counted in the game.
• Specialities — the kind of wiki work you do most becomes a title you carry.
• Search and warp — type an article name and land next to it instead of walking there.
• Different amounts for different work — adding a source or removing unsourced text will give more than adding links or fixing formatting.
• Loot on the ground — drops that fall where the monster died and pulse until you pick them up.

Getting started

1. Open Special:ContributeToWikiPlaying.
2. Look around as a guest if you want.
3. Link your Wikimedia account when you want to take edit missions.
4. Find an NPC in the city and take your first mission.

See also

• Special:ContributeToWikiPlaying — enter the game
• Project:About — about this wiki