Mental Floss

WikiTok Replaces Doomscrolling With Random Wikipedia Pages

The internet is filled with doom and gloom, but WikiTok is trying to change that.

ByCaLea Johnson|
Doomscrolling isn‘t fun or productive.
Doomscrolling isn‘t fun or productive. | D-Keine/GettyImages

Doomscrolling, or mindlessly reading negative news online, is an unhealthy habit many unknowingly adopt. According to the Mayo Clinic, the practice is known to cause feelings of distress, such as anxiety, helplessness, sadness, and anger. Many social media platforms thrive on your inclination to doomscroll by using algorithms to keep you online. A new site called WikiTok takes a different approach to exploring the internet.  

Popular Science reports that WikiTok aims to mitigate doomscrolling by offering an algorithm-free browsing experience. Instead of showing you incendiary content, the website pulls up snippets of random Wikipedia articles as you scroll. If a page seems interesting, you can click “Read more“ to read the full article. Otherwise, you can scroll to the next entry. You can also like or share articles and view them in different languages. With WikiTok, you can stumble upon random and fun subjects without the dread that often comes with following the whims of the algorithm. It‘s currently available on mobile and desktop browsers.

WikiTok started because of an Twitter/X post. On February 3, developer Tyler Angert shared the idea of making all of Wikipedia avaliable on a single, scrollable page. Inspired by this concept, a different programmer named Isaac Gemal spent about an hour and a half using Claude, a generative AI program, and Cursor, a coding editor, to create a WikiTok prototype.

Some users have asked for a version of the site that uses an algorithm to learn your interests, but Gemal is pushing back on that idea. The app developer told Ars Technica that “opaque algorithms“ are already a massive part of our lives, and there should be “one little corner in the world without them.“

Aside from opening WikiTok instead of TikTok, there are other ways to cut back on doomscrolling. In an article for Harvard Women's Health Watch, Harvard Medical School experts offer several suggestions, such as keeping your phone off your nightstand, turning off notifications, and focusing on community news. Other options include switching your phone to grayscale to make the screen less interesting. And if you’d still like to stay up to date on current events, here are some tips for following the news without experiencing media burnout.

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