Blog · Game data · October 13, 2026
How people race through Wikipedia
Between late June and mid-October 2026, players on our game made 1.13 million clicks through Wikipedia. Here is what those clicks say about how people actually find their way from one article to another.
All roads lead through the United States
Players visited more than 215,000 different articles, but a small set of them carries a big share of the traffic. The single most visited article, United States, received 2.3% of all clicks. That is three times more than the next article on the list. The top 1,000 articles together account for 37% of every click.
These are hub articles: broad pages that link to almost everything and are linked from almost everywhere. Countries, continents, languages and a handful of giant topics like World War II, YouTube and Video game act as the motorways of a Wiki Race.
Most visited articles
Number of times players clicked into each article
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The winning move: zoom out, then zoom in
Looking at which article players open right after another one shows a clear strategy. The most common moves almost never go sideways. They climb up to a broader topic and then back down towards the target.
The single most common move in the whole dataset is United States → North America. The article Continent appears in four of the seven most common moves: players use it as a switchboard to jump from Europe to Asia or the Americas.
A typical zoom-out route, stitched together from the most common single moves.
Most common moves
Article → next article, counted when both clicks were less than 2 minutes apart
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Languages lead home
A smaller pattern hides in the list of common moves: language articles point straight to their country. Japanese language → Japan, German language → Germany and French language → France are all among the 30 most common moves. Players on the German Wikipedia do exactly the same thing: Deutsche Sprache → Deutschland is one of the most common moves of all.
And once players reach United States, they leave in very different directions depending on their target: up to North America, down to U.S. state, or across to culture pages like Cinema of the United States and Video games in the United States.
Where players go after “United States”
Next article opened, within 2 minutes
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Ten seconds a click, ten clicks a round
The median time between two clicks is 10 seconds. A quarter of clicks happen within 4 seconds of the previous one, when players already know where they are going. A quarter take longer than 24 seconds, which is usually the moment someone is scanning a long article for the one link that gets them closer.
A typical round takes about 10 clicks. One in ten rounds needs 30 or more. Most games are short and simple: 83% have a single target, and more than half use the default 10-minute timer. Of all games that reached an end, 78% ended because every target was found, 12% were stopped by the host and 9% ran out of time.
Search is off in 89% of games, so almost everyone plays the classic way: links only.
Favourite targets
When players pick their own targets, they reach for the most famous (and infamous) pages they can think of. The most chosen targets were Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Epstein, Minecraft, Fortnite and Donald Trump, followed by Charlie Kirk, Roblox, Benjamin Netanyahu, LeBron James and Jesus.
Hitler at the top is a Wikipedia game tradition that is older than our site: “get to Hitler in as few clicks as possible” has been a classic challenge for years. The rest of the list is a snapshot of what people talked about in 2026, from games and streamers to politics and sport.
We left one target out of this list because its title is a slur.
When people play
Wiki Races peak in the evening. The busiest hour is 20:00 in Central European time. A second peak around 03:00 CET is evening in the Americas. The quietest stretch is the European morning, between 07:00 and 11:00.
Weekdays are busier than weekends: Friday has the most clicks, and Saturdays and Sundays have 26% and 29% fewer. That suggests a lot of Wiki Racing happens during school and work weeks.
Clicks by hour of day
Central European time (Berlin), all days combined
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How we measured this
The numbers come from our own privacy-friendly analytics (Umami), which records the name of each article a player clicks into, plus the settings when a game starts. They cover all games played between June 28 and October 13, 2026, in all languages. We only looked at totals; nothing here can be traced back to a player.
“Moves” are two clicks from the same browser session less than 2 minutes apart, so a few of them cross from one round into the next. Clicks per round count the clicks between two game starts in the same session, capped at 30 minutes. Game settings were only recorded from partway through the period, so the search figure is based on 43,561 games rather than all 89,075.
Try the zoom-out strategy yourself
Next time you are stuck, climb to a country, a continent or a language, and then work your way back down.