About WikiDrift
WikiDrift is a place to follow your curiosity. Ask a question and you get a short explanation written from Wikipedia, with every claim linked to the passage it rests on. Then pick a thread and keep drifting: each answer suggests where to go next, and your route is drawn as you go.
What WikiDrift does
When you ask a question, an AI model (Claude, made by Anthropic) searches English Wikipedia, reads the two to four articles that best cover it, and writes an answer of three to five short paragraphs. Each sentence is attached to a passage from those articles, copied word for word. Before the answer appears, every passage is looked up in the article text. Select any numbered citation to see what WikiDrift wrote beside what Wikipedia says, then open the article itself.
Each answer ends with three follow-up questions drawn from the articles it read, so one question leads to the next. You can ask for a simpler version or a deeper one. Answers are kept once written, so the next person who asks the same question gets the same answer straight away.
What it can’t do
- It only knows what Wikipedia says. If the articles are incomplete, out of date or wrong, the answer will be too. If Wikipedia doesn’t cover something, WikiDrift should say so rather than fill the gap.
- A matched quote is not a correct summary. It proves the passage exists, not that the explanation reads it correctly. The model can still misread, oversimplify or join facts that don’t belong together, so the source panel is the authority.
- Saved answers can fall behind. Wikipedia keeps changing, and an answer written last month may miss a recent edit, especially about living people and current events.
- It reads nothing else. No news sites, no academic papers, no other languages’ Wikipedias.
- It is not professional advice. Don’t rely on it for medical, legal, financial or safety decisions.
- New answers are rationed. Writing one costs money, so each visitor can start a limited number per hour and per day, and new answers pause once a daily spending ceiling is reached. Answers already written are always free to read.
The full process is described in how answers are made.
Not to be confused with
WikiDrift.com is not connected to WikiDrift by encyclopediae.org, an open-source research tool for studying how Wikipedia articles change across revisions. The two projects share a name but have different makers and different purposes: that tool examines Wikipedia’s editing history, while this site answers questions from Wikipedia’s current articles.
The name borrows a bit of internet slang. A “wikidrift” is what happens when you open one Wikipedia article and surface an hour later somewhere else entirely, having followed one link after another. WikiDrift is built to make that drift deliberate, and to keep the sources in view along the way.
Wikipedia, credited
Everything WikiDrift says comes from English Wikipedia, written by its volunteer editors. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license; every source panel links to the article it quotes. WikiDrift is independent and is not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections and ideas are welcome at info@wikidrift.com, or see the contact page.
The picture on the front page
Canaletto, Il bacino di San Marco, about 1738, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.