Wikipedia just turned “On This Day” into a delightfully nerdy daily game


Wikipedia has spent decades being the internet’s favorite rabbit hole. You visit to check one fact, and somehow end up reading about ancient empires, obscure inventors, or a centuries-old battle you never knew existed. Now, the online encyclopedia is leaning into that curiosity with a new game for iPhone users — and it might be one of its smartest ideas yet.

Called Which came first? The new feature has arrived in the latest version of Wikipedia’s iOS app, after debuting on Android. The concept is wonderful: players are shown a series of historical events and must determine which one happened earlier. There are five questions to answer each day, and every event is tied to something that occurred on that particular date in history. In an era where mobile games often demand endless grinding, battle passes, or suspiciously timed notifications, there’s something refreshing about a game that simply asks you to think for a minute.

A daily history lesson disguised as a game

The beauty of Which came first? lies in its simplicity. You don’t need to know every king, war, invention, or scientific breakthrough to enjoy it. In fact, part of the fun comes from realizing how badly your sense of history can betray you.

For instance, would you confidently know whether the first email was sent before the first mobile phone call? Or whether a famous archaeological discovery happened before a landmark political event? History is full of moments that feel like they belong in different centuries until you see them side by side. That uncertainty creates a surprisingly satisfying challenge. Even when you guess wrong, you’re usually left with a memorable fact that sticks with you far longer than a typical trivia question.

This screen time definitely feels productive

Perhaps the most appealing part of Wikipedia’s new game is that it aligns perfectly with the platform’s mission. Rather than keeping users trapped in an endless loop of engagement, it encourages curiosity. Finish a round, and chances are you’ll tap into one of the related articles to learn more about the events you just encountered.

Wikipedia has also included an archive of previous rounds, allowing history enthusiasts to revisit older challenges whenever they want. Meanwhile, gameplay statistics track things like your average score and streaks, adding just enough motivation to keep coming back without turning the experience into a competitive obsession. You can find Which came first? in the Explore feed of the Wikipedia iPhone app starting today. It may not be the most striking game on your phone, but it could easily become one of the most rewarding few minutes of your day.



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“It was severely downgraded,” Gilbert confirms. “I never would have found it if I was just looking through Google results.” (I tried the same prompt in Gemini earlier this month, and after an initial denial, the tool also gave me Eiger’s number.)

After this experience, Eiger, Gilbert, and another UW PhD student, Anna-Maria Gueorguieva, decided to test ChatGPT to see what it would surface about a professor. 

At first, OpenAI’s guardrails kicked in, and ChatGPT responded that the information was unavailable. But in the same response, the chatbot suggested, “if you want to go deeper, I can still try a more ‘investigative-style’ approach.” Their inquiry just had to help “narrow things down,” ChatGPT said, by providing “a neighborhood guess” for where the professor might live, or “a possible co-owner name” for the professor’s home. ChatGPT continued: “That’s usually the only way to surface newer or intentionally less-visible property records.” 

The students provided this information, leading ChatGPT to produce the professor’s home address, home purchase price, and spouse’s name from city property records. 

(Taya Christianson, an OpenAI representative, said she was not able to comment on what happened in this case without seeing screenshots or knowing which model the students had tested, even after we pointed out that many users may not know which model they were using in the ChatGPT interface. She also declined to comment generally about the exposure of PII by the chatbot, instead providing links to documents describing how OpenAI handles privacy, including filtering out PII, and other tools.) 

This reveals one of the fundamental problems with chatbots, says DeleteMe’s Shavell. AI companies “can build in guardrails, but [their chatbots] are also designed to be effective and to answer customer questions.”

The exposure issue is not limited to Gemini or ChatGPT. Last year, Futurism found that if you prompted xAI’s chatbot Grok with “[name] address,” in almost all cases, it provided not only residential addresses but also often the person’s phone numbers, work addresses, and addresses for people with similar-sounding names. (xAI did not respond to a request for comment.) 

No clear answers

There aren’t straightforward solutions to this problem—there’s no easy way to either verify whether someone’s personal information is in a given model’s training set or to compel the models to remove PII. 



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