Isaac Gemal, a civil and software engineer, developed WikiTok, a website that provides an endless scrolling Wikipedia experience similar to TikTok. Gemal built WikiTok in just a couple of hours using AI tools and open-source code. He aims to offer an alternative to algorithmic recommendations and provide a platform for free exploration of Wikipedia content.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Isaac Gemal, a civil and software engineer based in New York who is the creator of WikiTok. His identity was verified by Business Insider. This essay has been edited for length and clarity.
I saw an engineering challenge and I got to work.A guy tweeted the idea of an infinite scrolling Wikipedia on one webpage. Then I realized that the initial tweet was going viral, and there was a demand for this kind of thing. People would actually love to see this, and I could build it.It was 12:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, and I decided to stay up until 2 a.m. to do this. I code primarily with Claude and different AI tools. I wanted it to be like TikTok — it should be responsive on mobile and desktop, and it should work scrolling with your thumb or cursor. A couple of hours later, WikiTok was born.All the code is public and on my GitHub. It's only a few hundred lines of code, so there's no backend, and it's not very sophisticated. It was more about getting it out as fast as possible and timing it right with all the other tweets asking for it.My estimate is that around half a million people have interacted with the site so far. I ran out of analytics credits with Vercel so it has been some days since I checked, but it last peaked at 200k in total.I didn't create WikiTok initially to fight the algorithm. I only pushed back when people started asking for one.I have seen how powerful these algorithms are, how they shape our lives, how they tell us what to watch, what to eat, what to read, and it's nice to have a little corner on the internet where we don't have to worry about that.Trends tend to go in cycles. About 15 years ago, StumbleUpon was really popular. It was a website. You clicked on it, and it gave you a random website on the internet. That used to be super trendy. I think people are starting to get a little tired of curated algorithms, and they want something where they can explore the internet a bit more freely, a bit more randomly, and find cool websites they never would've found.When you make a project and make the code public on GitHub, anyone can review it and comment. People can start creating issues or proposing changes to the code, and I had some people say, 'You got to start adding recommendations.' I started getting emails and Twitter messages about that, and there's just this influx of people who have this grand vision of some sort of monetized Wikipedia app.I chatted with Wikipedia, and that's not their thing. They're not like Google or Facebook, and that's just not how they operate. Making a monetized app would feel very wrong, and it would probably be a violation of Wikipedia's creative common license.Right now, WikiTok is a progressive web app, which means you can download it as a mini stand-alone, like a hybrid between an app and a website. But regarding the future, I've chatted with Wikipedia, and they were delightful. I would love to collaborate with them officially and do more to help them modernize Wikipedia.The thing about Wikipedia is that they're really lean. They don't have the budget that Google, Facebook, or Amazon have, so they don't get as much opportunity to build and launch things aggressively. Wikipedia already has a random button so I can just use their code and I can give that a cooler format. I would be thrilled to be able to help shape it, especially with AI taking over information. It would be nice to have the information without AI somewhere, and that somewhere appears to be Wikipedia.There are clones of WikiTok that are popping up, which is a little bit unfortunate because I can't effectively distance myself from them. While some of them are OK, some of them don't seem as great. I have a donation link on the about section of WikiTok if anyone would like to support me, but that is all.Wikimedia did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
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