Published on 2026-08-14
Anyone who has ever opened one Wikipedia article and looked up forty minutes later on a completely different page knows the feeling — the "Wikipedia rabbit hole." WikiRacing is basically that feeling turned into a race, and along the way it throws up some genuinely startling facts. Here are a few that are worth knowing on their own, rabbit hole optional.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BCE. Cleopatra ruled Egypt roughly 2,500 years later, around 30 BCE — and the Moon landing happened about 2,000 years after that, in 1969. That places her chronologically closer to Apollo 11 than to the pyramid she's so often pictured next to.
Teaching at Oxford is recorded as far back as 1096. The Aztec Empire wasn't founded until 1428 — more than three centuries later. A university most people picture as impossibly old was already centuries into its history before the Aztec Empire even began.
The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896 is the shortest war on record, starting and ending in well under an hour. It's the kind of article that turns up in the middle of an unrelated WikiRacing route and completely derails your focus for a minute.
The Ginkgo biloba lineage dates back roughly 290 million years — older than the earliest dinosaurs. Individual ginkgo trees can also live for over a thousand years, and a handful even survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima within a mile of the blast.
There's an actual Wikipedia page, "Unusual articles," dedicated to cataloguing the encyclopedia's strangest corners — from a Founding Father's essay on flatulence to a molasses flood that killed 21 people in Boston. It's the closest thing Wikipedia has to a built-in map of its own rabbit holes.
The links that lead to detours like these are exactly what WikiRacing turns into a game: instead of getting lost for forty minutes, you're racing to reach a specific target, discovering a few unexpected facts along the way whether you meant to or not.
Start a quick race, or launch a themed challenge, and see what strange detour Wikipedia throws at you before you reach the finish line.