WikiRacr

WikiRacr is a competitive Wikipedia navigation game. Players race from a start article to a goal article by following Wikipedia links, with fewer clicks and faster times producing better results.

Live site: https://wikiracr.com

Features

• Solo play and a shared daily challenge
• Real-time multiplayer rooms with ranked and casual play
• Custom lobbies, speedrun, knockout, clicks, and score modes
• Higher or Lower using current Wikipedia pageview data
• Player profiles, leaderboards, match history, and Elo ratings
• Pro subscriptions through Stripe
• Responsive gameplay across desktop and mobile

Tech stack

• React and Vite
• Node.js and Express
• Socket.IO
• SQLite with better-sqlite3
• Clerk authentication
• Stripe subscriptions
• Wikimedia APIs, SQL dumps, and pageview datasets
• Nginx and PM2 in production

Repository structure

client/                 React frontend
server/                 API, game server, and Socket.IO handlers
data/                   Runtime article datasets
tools/pair-generator/   Local Wikipedia graph and dataset pipeline
scripts/                Deployment and dataset upload scripts

The generator runs locally because the Wikimedia dumps and graph caches are large. The generated pairs.db and higherlower_articles.json files are included so a fresh clone can run without rebuilding the full dataset.

Local setup

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18 or newer
• npm
• Python 3.8 or newer only when rebuilding datasets
• Clerk development keys
• Stripe test keys for subscription flows

Server

cd server
cp .env.example .env
npm install
npm run dev

Client

cd client
cp .env.example .env
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173.

Environment variables

Server

Variable	Purpose
PORT	Express and Socket.IO port
CLIENT_URL	Allowed frontend origin
DB_PATH	Pair dataset path
APP_DB_PATH	Runtime user and game data path
HIGHERLOWER_PATH	Higher or Lower article dataset path
CLERK_SECRET_KEY	Clerk server key
STRIPE_SECRET_KEY	Stripe server key
STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET	Stripe webhook signing secret
STRIPE_PRO_PRICE_ID	Stripe price used for Pro subscriptions

Client

Variable	Purpose
VITE_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY	Clerk browser key
VITE_SERVER_URL	API and Socket.IO server URL

Never commit real environment files. The included .env.example files contain placeholders only.

Dataset generation

The pair generator builds a directed Wikipedia graph, ranks articles with Wikimedia pageviews, and finds playable routes with bidirectional breadth-first search. See tools/pair-generator/README.md for the full process.

Validation

cd client
npm run build

cd ../server
npm run smoke:room

Deployment

The scripts under scripts/ read the production host from local environment variables instead of storing server details in the repository:

export WIKIRACR_SERVER=user@example.com
export WIKIRACR_REMOTE=/var/www/wikiracr
bash scripts/deploy.sh

Production secrets remain in local .env files and are excluded by .gitignore.

The current production layout keeps the two generated datasets at the project root. Local development uses the paths in server/.env.example, which point to the versioned files under data/.