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On a recent WikiTok browsing run, I ran across entries on topics like SX-Window (a GUI for the Sharp X68000 series of computers), Xantocillin (“the first reported natural product found to contain the isocyanide functional group), Lorenzo Ghiberti (an Italian Renaissance sculptor from Florence), the William Wheeler House in Texas, and the city of Krautheim, Germany—none of which I knew existed before the session started.
How WikiTok took off
The original idea for WikiTok originated from developer Tyler Angert on Monday evening when he tweeted, “insane project idea: all of wikipedia on a single, scrollable page.” Bloomberg Beta VC James Cham replied, “Even better, an infinitely scrolling Wikipedia page based on whatever you are interested in next?” and Angert coined “WikiTok” in a follow-up post.
Early the next morning, at 12:28 am, writer Grant Slatton quote-tweeted the WikiTok discussion, and that’s where Gemal came in. “I saw it from [Slatton’s] quote retweet,” he told Ars. “I immediately thought, ‘Wow I can build an MVP [minimum viable product] and this could take off.'”
Gemal started his project at 12:30 am, and with help from AI coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude and Cursor, he finished a prototype by 2 am and posted the results on X. Someone later announced WikiTok on ycombinator’s Hacker News, where it topped the site’s list of daily news items.
A screenshot of the WikiTok web app running in a desktop web browser.
Credit:
Benj Edwards
“The entire thing is only several hundred lines of code, and Claude wrote the vast majority of it,” Gemal told Ars. “AI helped me ship really really fast and just capitalize on the initial viral tweet asking for Wikipedia with scrolling.”
Gemal posted the code for WikiTok on GitHub, so anyone can modify or contribute to the project. Right now, the web app supports 14 languages, article previews, and article sharing on both desktop and mobile browsers. New features may arrive as contributors add them. It’s based on a tech stack that includes React 18, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and Vite.
And so far, he is sticking to his vision of a free way to enjoy Wikipedia without being tracked and targeted. “I have no grand plans for some sort of insane monetized hyper-calculating TikTok algorithm,” Gemal told us. “It is anti-algorithmic, if anything.“
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