These days Wordle takes the cake as the most popular online game. However, we shouldn't write off Wikitrivia as the next big thing for those looking for a way to pass the time while surfing the web. We are talking about a proposal that challenges us to put into practice our knowledge of history by ordering a series of events according to when they happened.
The idea is simple, but really entertaining. When entering Wikitrivia we find a randomly generated card that we must place in front of or behind another (also random) that is already located in the timeline. The events that are presented to us are related to very varied issues, and that also impacts the difficulty of one movement or another.
Thus, for example, we may have to interact with a card about when the Japanese construction company Kongō Gumi was founded, and the next one referring to the year actor Tom Holland was born. Some answers are more logical than others, and therein also lies the appeal of Wikitrivia, because we don't know what will happen next.
Another feature of this online game is that our possibilities are not unlimited. On the contrary, we start each game knowing that we can make a maximum of three mistakes . Each wrong move costs us a “life”; they are symbolized with hearts on the top edge of the graphical interface. And once we reach the limit of mistakes, Wikitrivia will tell us what our streak of correct answers has been and will invite us to play again to overcome it.
Wikitrivia presents us with such a component addictive as well as educational
With a simple premise, Wikitrivia is one more example of how you can achieve something that is located at the intersection between the entertaining, the addictive and the educational. But this is not achieved without facing some challenges, of course.
The creation of Wikitrivia has been the work of Tom J. Watson, a software engineer based in Madrid. The developer has not only shared the game's source code online on GitHub, but has also opened a GitHub conversation for users to report cards that include erroneous or incomplete data.
As its name indicates, Wikitrivia uses Wikidata and Wikipedia as sources of information. This means that, inevitably, some of the contents used are incorrect. This is not a bug in the game, but rather a matter of the Free Encyclopedia and its database. Who hasn't come across a Wikipedia entry with dubious or outright false data? Fortunately, this is easily corrected, since there is a community of editors always eager to add new members.
Wikitrivia is a very pleasant surprise for those looking for online entertainment well done. At the moment it is only available in English, although most of the descriptions on the cards are easily understood. And it is also useful to mention that it can be played both from a computer and through a smartphone or tablet; however, the mobile experience is still not quite refined and may not be the best, especially when our timeline starts to get congested.
