Depths of Wikipedia
| Depths of Wikipedia | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Website | Official website |
| Instagram information | |
| Channel | |
| Created by | Annie Rauwerda |
| Followers | 793,000 (April 1, 2022) |
Depths of Wikipedia is an Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok account dedicated to highlighting strange, obscure, and interesting facts from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Created on Instagram in 2020 by Annie Rauwerda, a college student at the University of Michigan, the account shares excerpts from various Wikipedia articles on humorous or absurd topics.
Rauwerda has additionally hosted a Wikipedia editing workshop and live comedy shows in connection with Depths of Wikipedia.
Creation
Depths of Wikipedia was created in April 2020 by Annie Rauwerda, a neuroscience major at the University of Michigan. Rauwerda created the account as a personal project at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, intending to share strange, surprising, and interesting facts from the English Wikipedia. According to Rauwerda, the project was inspired by a collage of excerpts from Wikipedia that she had made for a friend's zine, and by a photograph from the Wikipedia article on cow tipping. She had been interested in Wikipedia before beginning the project, spending time reading the online encyclopedia as a child and Wikiracing with friends in middle and high school.
An initial burst of attention came after Rauwerda posted a screenshot of an old revision of a Wikipedia page that stated that Internet celebrity Caroline Calloway's occupation was "nothing". After Calloway reached out, Rauwerda apologized, and Calloway subsequently shared the account with her followers, leading to rapid growth.
Following her Instagram account's increase in followers, Rauwerda created TikTok and Twitter accounts of the same name, and launched a newsletter covering unusual Wikipedia pages in greater detail.
Activity
[Wikipedia is] what the internet was supposed to be— collaborative and constructive and democratic and untouched by ads. It’s so inspiring that there are legions of volunteers that document all human knowledge for you and me to use for free, and I also am so continually excited by the site’s accessibility.
Annie Rauwerda, in Forbes
Depths of Wikipedia has highlighted articles on topics including exploding trousers, Nuclear Gandhi, chess on a really big board, and sexually active popes.
According to Rauwerda, she often receives submissions of Wikipedia articles to feature, but is selective in choosing which to post. In October 2021, she stated that she was getting "probably 30 to 50 user submissions per day".
Rauwerda has leveraged her account's virality to increase awareness of Wikipedia editing through a Wikipedia editing workshop in January 2021, which drew 107 editors and resulted in edits which were viewed over 500,000 times within that month. She is a Wikipedia editor. She has also hosted live comedy shows based around trivia from Wikipedia.
Reception
Notable followers of the Depths of Wikipedia account include Neil Gaiman, John Mayer, Troye Sivan, and Olivia Wilde.
According to Heather Woods, a professor of rhetoric and technology at Kansas State University, Depths of Wikipedia "makes the internet feel smaller", by "offering attractive – or sometimes hilariously unattractive – entry points to internet culture." Zachary McCune, the brand director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, described the account as "a place where Wikipedia comes to life, like an after-hours tour of the best of Wikipedia".