Wiki Game Solver

The Wiki Game is an online game where you attempt to navigate through Wikipedia from a start page to a goal page using as few other pages as possible.

Not long after I was shown it, I realized that I really wasn’t very good at it. After about 15 minutes of coming in last place all the time, I started to wonder how it worked, and how I could beat it.

As it turns out, it really isn’t very hard! It does require injecting some JS into the page, but it’s not that much.

#Usage

1. Start a new game, don’t press start!
2. Open your browser’s developer console. This will vary from browser.
3. Paste the compact version of the code (wiki-game-solver.min.js), and execute it (press enter)
4. Congratulations, you just won!

#How it works

The game isn’t open source, so I couldn’t see how the back end worked, but after playing a few games and checking what happened on the page, I worked out what it was doing.

The game was won when the iframe was at the final page location, or at least a clone of it on their servers with some extra querystring information.

With this, I started to write something that would change the location of the iframe to the goal. Fortunately for me, the goal URL was on the page. So all it took was a little switcheroo to win!

#Source

The source for this was written in pure JS, and relies heavily on the fact that the wiki game uses jQuery. The code can be found in a GitHub gist. Both the standard and compact versions are available.

#Disclaimer

As I experienced whilst developing this, the people that play Wiki Game don’t tend to like people cheating. There were a lot of people getting very annoyed whilst I was developing and testing. So please use this at your own risk! At the moment I don’t think there is any kind of banning system, but be warned!