The Joy of Learning Random Things on Wikipedia | Annie Rauwerda | TED

When I was younger,

I used to be really into Trivial Pursuit

and sometimes I would memorize the backs of the cards so I could win.

And that's how I learned some of my favorite trivia.

Like, there's a name for those three asterisks in the book

when the vibe changes.

It's called a dinkus.

And I also learned that Oklahoma has a state vegetable

and it's a watermelon.

I've always really liked trivia

precisely because it's information that carries no responsibility at all.

If you forget the information that's going to be on your test

or your mom's birthday, you might have consequences,

but you never have a test on state vegetables.

It's learning that's just for fun.

I've always been pretty curious.

I graduated in 2022

and my favorite parts of my neuroscience classes

were not necessarily the nitty gritty physiology.

I really liked the funnier stuff,

like the protein in limb development named after Sonic the hedgehog,

or this bridged bicyclic molecule

that looks like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

Not all of my coursework was so charming,

but I tried to convince myself

that everything was at least a little bit interesting.

One of the best ways to make things more interesting

is to learn more than you have to.

My favorite place for a long time, to quench my curiosity is Wikipedia,

the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

I've been a longtime fan.

I journaled about my Wikipedia reading habits when I was in fifth grade.

And when classes went online in 2020,

I found myself scrolling through all these Wikipedia articles

and contributing.

Anyone can edit the site.

Some of the things I read had to do with my coursework.

Like, I learned that the p in pH doesn't stand for anything.

OK.

I also learned about things that had no relation to my classes --

Fictional worms,

non-water floods.

Before I could think too long about what it would have been like

to live in London when beer was flowing through the streets,

I was reading about Goblu and Beatosu, fake towns.

They don't exist,

but they were put on the official Michigan map

in the Ohio section at the bottom

by mischievous mapmakers in the '70s.

(Laughter)

I started screenshotting my favorite pieces of trivia on Wikipedia

and I put them on Instagram.

And that was in the early pandemic and I'm still doing it.

I posted things like the Michigan State professor

who took this model kidney to Disney World

to see if roller coasters help pass kidney stones.

They do.

(Laughter)

Good to know.

Wikipedia is created by real people.

Unlike traditional publishers or other encyclopedias,

it doesn't require that you're an expert in your field.

This is a user whose name is Diannaa,

who has written probably everything you know about World War II.

And also P Diddy.

There are thousands of people like this.

You don't have to be an expert.

You just have to be able to synthesize sources

and follow style guidelines.

Those guidelines are strict,

but not so strict that a little personality

doesn't shine through sometimes.

This article about the Popemobile

I think has quite a bit of personality.

It says "John Paul II requested

that the media stop referring to the car as the popemobile,

saying that the term was ‘undignified.’

The popemobile ... ”

and then it goes on and on.

(Laughter)

I'm also a fan of the Wikipedia editor

who saw this caption about a bagpiper and a penguin

and decided to clarify which was the bagpiper.

(Laughter)

Thank you, very helpful.

I'm a fan of the Wikipedia editor that submitted this photo for Vienna bread

that has motion blur for some reason.

(Laughter)

Wikipedia sometimes feels infinite.

And I'm sure you've heard warnings that it's not perfect.

Maybe your seventh grade teacher said, "Don't use Wikipedia, anyone can edit it."

And it's true that there is some misinformation and disinformation

on the site.

Often, it's only up for a few seconds or minutes,

but sometimes hoaxes last longer.

For example,

there was an article for 10 years

about an Aboriginal god called Jar'Edo Wens.

It didn't cite any sources.

It should have been deleted, but it wasn't.

And eventually, this information was printed in books

and told in university lectures.

Until after 10 years, somebody realized that the article was just created

by probably an Australian teenager named Jared Owens.

(Laughter)

So Wikipedia is not perfect,

but studies have shown that it contains fewer factual inaccuracies

than Encyclopedia Britannica.

And I think that's really impressive.

When I was in the --

In the summer of 2020, I kept posting my favorite trivia.

Physically, I was quarantined, but I was exploring the world.

Things like breast-shape hills or this unusual chess opening.

I definitely was aware that there were islands in lakes.

Like, I knew that was a thing.

But it had never occurred to me

that there could be an island in a lake on an island.

I also had never thought about the possibility

of an island in a lake on an island in a lake.

And I had definitely never considered the idea

of an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.

(Laughter)

Wikipedia is just huge.

It has 6.6 million articles in English alone.

But it's not done.

Wikipedia needs editors like you to contribute to free knowledge,

whether that's small things like fixing commas or adding sources

or big things like heavy content editing

or making sure people aren't using it for advertisements.

There are some fun ways to contribute.

This is a website called wikishootme.toolforge.org

and it shows you what landmarks nearby need photos.

That's a fun way to contribute.

Wikipedia should be representative of everything in the world

and you would hope that its contributors also reflected the world's population.

By best estimates,

the contributors are about 80 percent male,

so there are a lot of efforts with edit-a-thons

and marketing campaigns to get more people editing.

I'll remind you, it's created by very normal, real people.

This couple in 2008

noticed that there were no photos on the Wikipedia article for high five,

so they took matters in their own hands,

acting out the sequence: up high,

down low, victim misses, and too slow with finger guns.

And then they added a hyperlink

so you can go visit the finger gun article if you want to.

I thought this was very charming when I first saw it.

And so I reached out to them, I tracked them down.

It turns out after this, after they did this, they started dating,

they got married, they had kids,

and they agreed to recreate the photos with their kids.

(Laughter and applause)

So I ...

People take the task of writing an encyclopedia very seriously.

I said that I get really into trivia.

Some of these people will spend a long time doing very trivial things.

There was a long debate on whether the caption "Guy Standing sitting"

was too funny for an encyclopedia.

They eventually removed the caption.

There was a 40,000-word discussion on whether to capitalize the I

in “Star Trek Into Darkness.”

There was an even longer discussion

on whether this thing should be called corn or maize.

Maize is winning, as Ann Arbor will be happy to know.

So ultimately, I kind of laugh at this sort of meticulous detail,

but I'm glad that people are thinking this deeply about things,

especially in an era of social media filter bubbles

and 24-hour news cycles,

when truth looks different depending on where you look.

People on Wikipedia are coming together to write history in real time.

I think the inner workings of an online encyclopedia are fascinating.

Turns out, other people do too.

When I was a student here last year,

I started moonlighting as a journalist,

explaining how a site this big gets made by volunteers.

I wrote about how, when after Russia invaded Ukraine,

downloads of Wikipedia skyrocketed in Russia

as the state was limiting free press.

Wikipedia is not perfect,

but clearly it's an information source that people desire.

Or when the Queen died, I wrote about the Wikipedia editor

that was so quick to change her article into past tense.

(Laughter)

I kept posting online and I was getting a following

and I started leading edit-a-thons to get more people to contribute.

Then I started doing comedy shows

and I was surprised to learn that one,

I thought it was fun,

but also people were excited to pay money to go to a show about an encyclopedia.

I'm still really drawn to useless knowledge.

Like Diego, the tortoise who had so much sex

that he saved his species.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Some applause for him, great.

I'll let him know.

(Applause)

Or I like "Boops boops in a bucket,"

I just like that.

But I really wouldn't call it useless knowledge.

I don't think I would call anything useless knowledge,

because the thing about trivia

is that it's an invitation to learn more about a subject.

You might learn a trivia fact and suddenly you're far more interested

and you're learning about things

you never thought were interesting before.

Ken Jennings once said trivia was the bait on the fishhook of education.

I previously had little interest in the romantic period of piano music,

and then I learned that Franz Liszt,

he had such good looks and dramatic performances

that these girls in the 1800s in Europe

were getting diagnosed with something called Liszt fever

because they were such fan girls.

Suddenly, I'm interested in piano music history.

Similarly, I didn't have a lot of interest in life in the 13th century.

And then I learned about this boy named Onfim

and he was a six-year-old

and his random birch bark drawings were preserved.

And he wrote things that you would see a six-year-old draw today,

like these proclamations like, "I am a wild beast."

And his stick figure drawings with too many fingers,

they look like something that a six-year-old would draw today.

It reminded me that for all of history, people have always been people.

Sometimes with trivia, you start somewhere random

and then you start thinking about empathy

and geopolitics and who knows, science, what have you.

Facts are really powerful, even fun facts.

And luckily, we live at a time

where information has never been easier to access.

Whether you're looking for fictional worms

or non-water floods

or more serious things like atmospheric carbon data.

If nothing else,

trivia reminds you that the world is huge

and it's amazing

and it's really interesting

and I don't think that's trivial at all.