The act of scrolling is generally associated these days with the concept of doomscrolling: the hollow-eyed, passive trawl through a constant barrage of content that serves to reinforce the fact that everything is terrible and getting worse. But when you think about it, there’s nothing inherently soul-crushing about idle browsing. It’s just that the content served to us by our algorithmic overlords is largely designed to enrage, divide, and induce despair in us.
It wasn’t always thus, obviously. One of the great joys of the early internet was just, ahem, surfing the web—wandering aimlessly from page to page, seeing what niche interests or new subjects you might stumble upon. There’s at least one place where you can still do this: Wikipedia, where you can travel between wildly different subjects in surprisingly few clicks. (There’s even a game for this!)
One thing Wikipedia has always lacked, however, is an equivalent to the endless, scrollable feeds that form the centerpieces of most of today’s social media platforms. Happily, developer Lyra Rebane has taken it upon herself to create exactly that.
The project is called Xikipedia, and as its homepage explains, it’s an open-source “pseudo social media feed that algorithmically shows you content from Simple Wikipedia.” The page is as minimalist as could be: no bells or whistles, just an endless list of Wikipedia articles, through which you can scroll to your heart’s content.
You can customize the feed to lean more or less heavily on subjects that interest you; otherwise, you’ll start with an entirely random list of pages. They’re really random, too—when we visited, the first four articles we were presented with were on a small (and “very slippy”, apparently) town in France, a Native American musician, a Sikh caste system, and Jamaican jerk cuisine.
Xikipedia does replicate one key aspect of social feeds: even if you start with no specified interests, the site will adapt itself by reference to the articles on which you click, presenting you with pages on similar subjects. However, as the homepage explains, this is more a proof of concept than an exercise in rage-baiting: “[Xikipedia] is made as a demonstration of how even a basic non-[machine learning] algorithm with no data from other users can quickly learn what you engage with to suggest you more similar content.” The algorithm resets itself whenever you close or refresh the tab, and there’s no facility for creating an account to store persistent data.
So next time you have five minutes to kill and find yourself reaching for your phone, instead of your Facebook feed or the site formerly known as Twitter, why not try idly scrolling through Xikipedia? It’ll probably be better for your blood pressure.
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