Many years ago, the LiveJournal Random Image Generator showed just how interesting context-free photos plucked haphazardly from a community of users could be. Wikigifs, a site that pulls random animated GIFs from across Wikipedia, is a bit different. Instead of giving us a peek into the lives of others, it offers bites of knowledge without explanation, diagrams of phenomena we can’t understand or ads for Wikimedia projects we’ll never work on. Do you know what the compound of five tetrahedra looks like? Well, you do now, and where that leads is up to you.
Every animated GIF on Wikipedia, one random image at a time
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
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