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Welcome to PlayTheWiki

A game where the loot is real and so are the articles.

No account needed to start — link your Wikimedia account when you want your work to count.

What PlayTheWiki is

PlayTheWiki turns contributing to Wikipedia into a game you play, not a chore you promise yourself you will get to. You walk a city built out of real articles, pick up work the encyclopedia actually needs, make the edit on Wikipedia itself, and get paid once that edit has proven it can survive.

Three things make it different from a quiz app with a Wikipedia skin:

The city is the encyclopedia. Every block you walk past is a real article, pulled live, carrying its real state — sourced, stub, no image, untouched since 2004.
The edit is a real edit. You link your own Wikimedia account and the change lands in the article's history under your name, with your credit. Nothing is simulated.
The reward waits for the work to hold. A contribution pays after 48 hours without being reverted. Nobody gets paid for an edit the community threw out.

You can walk in and play without an account. You will be told, clearly, that a guest's progress can be lost — and you can bind that progress to a real account later without starting over.

How a session actually goes

Walk into the city. Blocks are articles. Their colour and state tell you what each one is missing.
Pick up a mission. Read one, improve one, or translate one.
Do the work on Wikipedia. The game hands you the article and gets out of the way.
Come back. The edit is found automatically and put on a 48-hour hold.
Get paid. If it survived, WikiCoins and XP land.
Spend it. Gear, boots, wings, teleports, skins — see below.

What you can do in the game

Contribute for real

Edit missions — improve an article that needs it, verified against the real revision history.
Reading missions — read an article properly and answer questions drawn from its own content.
Translation missions — find what one language has and another does not, and close the gap.
Link your Wikimedia account — one-time OAuth, identify-only. The game never edits as you; you edit as you.

Explore

A living city of articles streamed from the wiki, block by block, as you walk.
Article cubes you can inspect on the spot — read it, see its quality score, see what it is missing.
Filters — show me only stubs, only articles with no image, only things created before 2005, only what I have not touched.
Other cities — each language and topic area is its own place.
My Journey — the map of everything you personally have worked on.
Fast travel — bus stops, airports and ports for getting across the map.
Events — real campaign events from the wiki surface as portals in the city.

Fight

Dungeons built out of an article's own weaknesses.
Enemy archetypes drawn from what is wrong with the article — Citation Wraiths, Stub Sprites, Reference Phantoms, the Imageless, the Outdated, the Untranslated.
Knowledge Strike — spend Knowledge Points for a heavy hit. KP is the resource that separates a good fight from a lucky one.
Quizzes mid-dungeon drawn from the article you are fighting through; a perfect run pays double.
Boss portals that appear at random and are worth the detour.
Multiplayer rooms — clear a dungeon with other players in real time.

Grow

Levels and decades — your avatar changes as you climb, and so do the monsters.
Badges for the milestones worth marking.
Healing devices that level up, so your potions heal more as you go.

Kit yourself out

A shop with 187 items — head, glasses, body, back, gloves, legs, feet, accessory, weapons, consumables and skins, across five rarities.
Boots that make Shift a real sprint, and wings that let you fly over the city.
Shortcuts that permanently upgrade the boots or wings you already like.
Brews — temporary strength, defence and speed, with the clock visible on your HUD.
One-shot teleports for when walking back is not the fun part.
+X% XP and +X% WikiCoin gear that genuinely pays out.
Cosmetic skins that change how your avatar looks in the city, the dungeon and the map.
Loot from chests and bosses.

What a contribution is worth

Today every validated edit pays a flat reward plus bonuses for the signals the game can already see — a citation added, a new section, a first-ever edit on that article — and a perfect quiz run doubles the WikiCoin payout on a dungeon.

What is being built next is finer than that: paying by what kind of contribution the edit was, because paying by byte count quietly tells every player that cleanup is worthless.

Planned value bands
Band	Kind of contribution	Relative value
S	Sourcing existing content; removing unsourced content	8×
A	New sourced content; a new section; an image	5×
B	New unsourced content; reorganisation	3×
C	Wikification — links, categories, infobox fields; copy-editing	1×
D	Formatting and maintenance	0.5×

Removal outranks most addition on purpose. Adding is pleasant and people volunteer for it; deleting someone else's unsourced paragraph is unpleasant, slightly risky, and chronically under-supplied.

New articles will be scored differently — as a whole, by the quality class they earn (Stub, Start, C, B, GA, FA), assessed automatically rather than by counting what was typed. And every validated edit will keep a flat base, because not all good work leaves something a machine can count.

Coming next

Named here so nobody is surprised by what is not in the game yet:

Create-article missions — write something that does not exist, paid by the quality class it earns.
Claim past contributions — bring the edits you already made in for retroactive credit.
Specialities — the wiki work you do most becomes what you are known for.
Search and warp — find the article you care about and land next to it instead of walking.
Contribution-type scoring — the bands above, live.
Loot on the ground — drops that fall where the monster died and pulse until you pick them up, and the best gear reserved for players whose contributions have been validated.

Getting started

Open Special:ContributeToWikiPlaying — that is the game.
Play as a guest if you want to look around first.
When you are ready, link your Wikimedia account so your work counts and your progress is safe.
Take your first mission from the board.

Ground rules

Your edits are yours. The game never edits on your behalf. You are sent to the article and you make the change.
We only ask who you are. The account link uses the identify grant and nothing more.
Rewards follow the community, not the game. If the wiki reverts your edit inside 48 hours, it does not pay. That is the point.
Guest progress is fragile. Play without an account if you like, but bind it before you care about what you have built.