Wikipedia Speedrunning, the Structure of the Web and Linked-Based Rankings
Speedrunning has generally been an intrinsic part of video games since the medium’s inception. Similar to competing for a high score, speedrunning is a competitive sport amongst the game’s players. While some games encourage players to speedrun their games, such as Super Metroid which rewards players with special end-game credits depending on how quickly they finish the game, most speedruns in gaming are generated by the broader gaming community. Speedrun categories such as Any% (How quickly you can finish the game, regardless of how you achieve it) and 100% (How quickly you can finish the game while also unlocking all of the achievements) are two of some of the most popular categories, yet neither of them are built into any of the games in which they’re run. Sometimes speedrunning goes beyond what one thinks is a typical video game. A popular example of this is Wikipedia Speedruns.
As Wikipedia obviously is not a game, how does one speedrun the virtual library? The ‘gameplay’ is actually quite simple: one is given two randomly generated Wikipedia pages, one at which they start at and the other which is where they want to end up. But the catch? You can only navigate between pages by utilizing the article links on the given page. Despite the concept being simple, the strategies can sometimes be fascinating, especially to students of web networks. A very simple strategy can be understood through Linked-Based Rankings. When given two pages, it’s very likely that each of them are hyperspecific and entirely unrelated. But each of them most likely have links to slightly more general topics. Essentially, the more general the topic, the higher the page’s authority score will be. So the common strategy is this: navigate to a page that have the highest first-round authority score necessary for you set yourself on a trajectory to get to your destination. For example, I played a game recently where I had to navigate from the HTML page to Kyrgyzstan:
| Page Name | Step # | First-Step Authority Score |
| HTML | 0 | 651 |
| Markup Language | 1 | 105 |
| Concept | 2 | 91 |
| Human | 3 | 983 |
| Central Asia | 4 | 239 |
| Kyrgyzstan | 5 | 342 |
Notice that while the first couple of pages didn’t really have high authority scores, my goal was to get to a broad topic, such as ‘Human’ so that I could narrow it back down to exactly what I wanted (Kyrgyzstan). While this may not be the most optimal strategy, I’m still rather proud that I completed this run in just under 22 seconds (21.89 sec)!
Beyond making for a neat study for a Networks research assignment, Wikipedia Speedrunning is also a genuinely fun thing to try! I highly recommend it!
Sources/Links/Resources:
Wikipedia Speedrun Game: https://wikispeedruns.com/
First-Round Authority Score Source: https://linkcount.toolforge.org/