Last weekend there was a mini-LD™ coding challenge issued by the legendary GirlFlash – make a game using wikipedia.

So here was my idea: Grab a random page and tell the user the name of it.  Have links from that page falling down the screen (mixed with links from other pages) and see if the user can click the right ones.

So I made that.

Well, let me tell you, it doesn’t work all that great.  The two big problems are:

• A “totally random wikipedia page” is too hard, you would literally need encyclopedic knowledge to have a chance at 99% of the crazy things it chooses.   This could actually be worked around, like I could limit it to ‘80’s comedy movies‘ for instance… but.. meh.  I sort of like the zany and crazy things it comes up with.
• Even when the subject is interesting just dumbly grabbing links from the page willy-nilly ends up being ridiculous.  It’s just too crazy.

With all that said, here is an updated version for Windows if you want to give it a shot.

Download the zip here.  Can you score 100 points?

If you like the idea of using Wikipedia for games, be sure to check out the other mini-LD stuff, it’s quite cool.