If you ever wanted to waste time online without feeling like you're completely wasting your life, the Wikipedia Game is the thing for you.

The rules of the game are very simple. The objective is to get from page A to page B using only the blue hyperlinks in Wikipedia. There is an official game website here, or you can go to Wikipedia and do it by yourself.

For instance, if given the words “Mushroom” and “Harper Lee” your goal is to navigate from one page to the other in as few clicks as possible.

In this case, you might go: Mushroom > supermarkets > Books > novel > gothic fiction > Harper Lee. Obviously, there's thousands of possible routes from getting between any two pages, and invariably some dead ends.

Along the way, you might learn a thing or two about a thing or two. Wikipedia is not a scholarly source, but most articles are comparable in accuracy to any encyclopedia, and articles for major topics (i.e. countries, religion) are edit-locked to ensure they retain correct information.

We are inundated with information on a daily basis, yet most of it is unsolicited. Wikipedia is one of the few places that promotes the sharing of information asking for little to nothing in return, not even relying on ad revenue. We take this for granted. The entirety of human knowledge is at your fingertips, just a few clicks away. If you take some time to play the Wiki game, you will notice the underlying connections between the articles, and the hidden shortcuts that lie within. Everything in this world is connected, with or without the internet. Learn about cultures, animals, scandals, stories, people, arts. Learn about the mysteries of the cosmos in everyday language, discover something new, find patterns. Give yourself the satisfaction of feeling clever when you find out how a Roman forum connects to Carnegie Hall, or what a raven shares with a writing desk.

If reality echoes into the digital world, then the classification system that codifies a tree connecting all living things echoes into the web in which Wikipedia stores its information. Just as life is traced back to the smallest living organism, it follows that information would link back to a more basic form, Philosophy. If you follow the first blue link of each article, you will find your way there too.