Did you know that there is a Swiss political party that campaigns against the use of PowerPoint? That some believe that Avril Lavigne died in 2003 and was replaced by a doppelganger? Or that there is a stone in a museum in Taiwan that looks eerily like a piece of meat?
Probably not – unless you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people who follow @depthsofwikipedia. The Instagram account shares bizarre and surprising excerpts from the vast, crowdsourced online encyclopedia, including funny images (a chicken literally crossing a road) and little moments in history (Mitt Romney drives his dog on top of his car for several hours). Some posts are healthy — like Hatsuyume, the Japanese word for your first dream of the year — while others aren’t safe for work (panda pornography, for example).
Annie Rauwerda, 22, started the account in the early days of the pandemic, when others were baking sourdough bread and learning to knit. “Everyone started projects, and this was my project,” she said.
At the time, she was a sophomore at the University of Michigan. Students are often discouraged from using Wikipedia as a resource in academic work because most pages are editable by anyone and can contain inaccurate information. But for Ms. Rauwerda, the site was always more about entertainment: clicking one link after another for hours, getting lost in rabbit holes.
“Wikipedia is the best on the internet,” said Ms. Rauwerda in a telephone interview. “It’s what the internet was supposed to be. It has a hacker ethos of working together and making something.”
Initially, only her friends followed the account. But it got a wave of attention when Ms Rauwerda posted about influencer Caroline Calloway, who was angry that the post contained an old version of her Wikipedia page saying her profession was “nothing”. Ms. Rawerda apologized and Ms. Calloway later raised the account on her Instagram.
Ms. Rawerda has since expanded @depthsofwikipedia to Twitter and TikTok. She sells merchandise (such as a coffee mug decorated with an image from the Wikipedia article for “bisexual enlightenment”) and has hosted a live show in Manhattan, featuring trivia and stand-up.
Her followers often pitch her Wikipedia pages to spotlight them, but these days it’s hard to find an entry that will impress Ms. Rauwerda. “If it’s a fun fact that’s been on the Reddit homepage, I’m definitely not going to repost it,” she said. “For example, there are only 25 zeppelins in the world. I’ve known that for a long time and it went viral on Twitter a few days ago. I was shocked. I was like, ‘Everyone knows this.’”
She’s picky in large part because many of her followers depend on @depthsofwikipedia for digging up the internet’s hidden gems.
“I just love learning things, especially these strange pictures and things that I could never find on my own,” says Gabe Hockett, 15, a high school student in Minneapolis. He said his favorite posts from the account are “The Most Unwanted Song” and the “Dave Matthews Band Chicago River Incident.”
Jen Fox, 22, said exchanging messages from the account with her boyfriend is “a special, nerdy love language.” It has also been a litmus test for friendships. When Ms. Fox, a copywriter, moved to San Francisco in February, she would mention the account to new people she met. If they were familiar with it, she said, “we’d DM each other and share our favorite posts, which felt like we were really cementing a concrete friendship.” Ms. Fox even attended an @depthsofwikipedia meeting at a local brewery. “There’s such a community behind it,” she said.
It’s nothing new for Wikipedia enthusiasts to rally around their passion for the platform. A Facebook group called Cool Freaks’ Wikipedia Club, founded eight years ago, has nearly 50,000 members who actively trade links.
Rauwerda’s account “is making the Internet smaller,” said Heather Woods, an assistant professor of rhetoric and technology at Kansas State University. “It speeds up the rabbit hole phenomenon by providing attractive — or sometimes hilariously unappealing — entry points into Internet culture.”
Zachary McCune, the brand director for the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, said @depthsofwikipedia is an extension of the site’s participatory ethos. “It’s a place where Wikipedia comes to life, like an after-hours tour of the best of Wikipedia,” said Mr. McCune.
And because Wikipedia has over 55 million articles, it’s helpful to have a guide like Ms. Rauwerda. She hopes that visitors to her page will go home with new shared knowledge. “I want you to see something that makes you pause and think, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting,'” said Ms. Rauwerda. “Something that makes you rethink the world a little bit.”
