Articles are fetched from English Wikipedia when you click. Summary text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence; images may carry other licences. Not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation.
Each press of Discover Something New pulls up a random article from English Wikipedia and shows its title, the opening summary and, when the article has one, a thumbnail image. If the topic looks interesting, Read Full Article opens the complete page on Wikipedia in a new tab. People use it for a quick dose of trivia, to find writing or quiz prompts, or to break out of the usual reading bubble; the category buttons steer it towards a subject area when you want something less random.
With All selected, your browser calls Wikipedia's public REST API endpoint en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/random/summary, which returns a random article's title, plain-text extract, thumbnail and URL. With a category selected, it first asks the MediaWiki API (api.php, list=categorymembers) for up to 50 pages filed directly in that category, such as Category:Science, picks one at random, and then loads its summary. Requests go straight from your browser to Wikipedia, identified with the header Api-User-Agent: ToolHub-RandomWikipedia/1.0, and thumbnails load from Wikimedia's image servers. As with any website, Wikimedia can see your IP address and browser details when these requests are made. Nothing passes through a ToolHub server.
Favorites and history stay in your browser's localStorage under the keys wiki_favs and wiki_history. Each entry holds the article title, the first 100 characters of its summary, the thumbnail address and the link. They are never uploaded, and clearing your site data deletes them.
The summaries come from Wikipedia, whose text is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). If you reuse a summary, credit Wikipedia and link to the article, and share any adapted version under the same licence. Images are hosted by Wikimedia and may carry other licences, so check the file page before reusing one. Because category mode only samples 50 direct members of a broad top-level category, it tends to return general overview pages rather than the full range of articles on a subject, and results depend on how Wikipedia editors have organised that category. Wikipedia content can change at any time and may contain errors, so verify important facts elsewhere.
It uses Wikipedia's own random-page service, which gives every article in the main namespace roughly the same chance. Because most articles are short or specialised, those turn up far more often than famous topics.
Wikipedia only returns a thumbnail when the article has a lead image. Without one, the card shows just the title and summary.
Category membership is set by Wikipedia editors, and the top-level categories used here contain a mix of overview pages and loosely related topics. Switch back to All if the results feel repetitive.
This tool uses English Wikipedia only. Once an article is open on Wikipedia, the language menu on that page links to versions in other languages where they exist.
Remove individual favorites with the × button. To wipe both lists at once, clear this site's stored data in your browser settings.