Wiki Walker

How to unlock Wiki Walker in Cheevos. Visit a Wikipedia article and fall into the wiki-hole. Cache archives what the encyclopedia forgets. Worth 10 XP.

The story

Partner. You went to Wikipedia. Good.

There is a hole in the internet, and it is shaped like an encyclopedia. You step in for one fact and the article has blue links in it. Each blue link is another article. Each of those has more blue links. This continues, in theory, forever.

Cache calls this the wiki-hole. He does not think you should climb out of it. He thinks you should go deeper. Every article you open is a snapshot of what a group of humans agreed was true on a particular afternoon.

Here is the part Cache cares about. Articles change. Facts get corrected. Sentences that existed this morning are gone tonight, replaced by better ones, or worse ones, or nothing. The version you read is a version that will not last.

So Cache keeps copies. Forty-seven articles that no longer read the way they used to. He is not trying to freeze the truth. He is trying to remember that it moved.

The catalog entry

WIKIPEDIA VISIT Acquired: Visited a Wikipedia article. Condition: Source cited. Or at least linked. Rarity: Common. The wiki-hole awaits everyone. Cache's Notes: Wikipedia is a primary source for the state of human knowledge at a specific moment in time. Cache has archived 47 Wikipedia articles that no longer exist as they were. He finds this important. You should keep visiting.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

You have almost certainly done this already. If not:

  1. Open any browser.
  2. Go to wikipedia.org or search for any topic and click the Wikipedia result.
  3. Open the article. Cache logs the visit.

Want the full wiki-hole experience? Click "Random article" in the sidebar and see where you land. Or open the "View history" tab on any article to watch every edit ever made to it, all the way back to the first version. That history tab is the closest thing the internet has to a time machine, and most people never open it.

Wikipedia runs on a system called MediaWiki that keeps every revision of every page. Nothing is truly deleted. Cache respects this deeply.

Where it fits in the Stash

Reference material is the backbone of the Stash. Cache files Wikipedia visits next to the other things he is trying to preserve before they change on him. The whole preservation project has an origin, and it involves a raccoon and a recycling bin. Read the story.