When you need a quick answer — whether it’s why zebras have stripes or when the Holy Roman Empire ended — Wikipedia is usually the first place people visit.
Most of us think of it as a serious online encyclopedia. But behind its millions of articles is a huge community with a great sense of humor, plenty of inside jokes, and some truly bizarre stories.
We at AdmiGram.com rounded up 10 surprising and funny facts about Wikipedia that show there’s much more to the world’s biggest encyclopedia than meets the eye.
10 Fun Wikipedia Facts You Probably Didn’t Know
There’s an Official List of Really Weird Articles
Wikipedia has a page called “Unusual Articles.” It features topics so strange they sound made up, including extreme ironing, the 1518 dancing plague, the Pig War, and even the legal status of Santa Claus.
A Fake War Fooled Everyone for Years
In 2007, someone created a detailed Wikipedia article about a fictional 17th-century conflict called the Bicholim Conflict, a supposed war between Portugal and the Maratha Empire.
The page stayed online for five years — even earning Wikipedia’s own “Good Article” status — before an editor tried to verify the sources in 2012 and discovered that none of them existed, and neither had the war.
One Teenager Accidentally Rewrote Scottish Wikipedia
In 2020, editors discovered that tens of thousands of articles in the Scots-language version of Wikipedia had been written by an American teenager who didn’t actually speak Scots.
He translated English articles using online dictionaries and guessed at the spelling, unintentionally creating a version of the language that wasn’t authentic.
Almost Any Article Can Be Reached in Just a Few Clicks
Wikipedia fans love playing the Wiki Game.
The challenge is simple: start on one random article and reach another using only internal links. For example, many players can get from Toilet Paper to Albert Einstein in just four or five clicks.
Almost Every Path Leads to Philosophy
Here’s a famous internet experiment.
Open almost any Wikipedia article, click the first main link, then repeat the process over and over. Surprisingly, about 95% of the time, you’ll eventually end up on the article for Philosophy.
Try it — you might lose track of time.
Editors Have Argued for Years Over a Single Word
Wikipedia editors sometimes have surprisingly intense debates.
One of the longest-running disputes involved whether the Polish city of Gdańsk should be referred to by its Polish name or its German name, Danzig, across thousands of related articles. The disagreement became so heated and prolonged that Wikipedia eventually had to create a dedicated policy — the “Gdańsk vote” — just to settle it.
People Have Imagined Wikipedia’s Final Article
Wikipedia even has a page where editors discuss what the last article ever written might look like if the encyclopedia stopped being updated.
One popular idea is that the final surviving editor would simply write:
“Well… that’s it.”
A Joke Eventually Became “Fact”
In 2008, a 17-year-old jokingly added a fake nickname, “Brazilian aardvark,” to the Wikipedia article about the coati, a raccoon-like animal from South America.
The false information remained online for six years and was repeated by hundreds of websites and several major newspapers, helping spread the made-up nickname far beyond Wikipedia.
Wikipedia Has Its Own Monument
Wikipedia is so influential that it even has its own statue.
Located in Słubice, Poland, the sculpture shows four figures holding the encyclopedia’s famous puzzle-globe logo above their heads. It honors the thousands of volunteer editors around the world who built Wikipedia.
A Tiny Number of People Do Most of the Work
Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but a small group of incredibly dedicated volunteers does much of the work.
One editor, Steven Pruitt, has made millions of edits and created more than 30,000 articles on the English-language Wikipedia — enough that he’s edited roughly a third of all English Wikipedia articles in some way. His contributions were so significant that Time magazine named him one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Internet.
