Catfishing!
May. 11th, 2026 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinealaSo the other day lysimache introduced me to one of those daily web games that has apparently been going for a while, but she just found out about it recently: Catfishing.
It is a Wikipedia-based game, sort of like Redactle. Redactle, as you may know, gives you one redacted Wikipedia entry per day, and you unredact the entry by guessing words that you think appear in it, until you have guessed enough words to be able to guess the name of the entry.
Catfishing is like a reverse, shortened version of that. Instead of the article itself, you get a list of all the categories the article appears in, some of which make it much more obvious than others (e.g., "Les Misérables characters, Fictional mayors, Fictional outlaws, Fictional French people, Fictional French criminals, Literary characters introduced in 1862, Fictional characters from the 19th century, Fictional thieves, Fictional Catholics, Food theft") and then you have to use that information to guess the name of the article. (e.g., "Jean Valjean").
(Both Redactle and Catfishing have some kind of minimum notability threshold implemented somehow, so it's generally going to be something you have heard of, or something you will feel like you probably should have heard of.)
Every day you get ten new articles to guess, and they will let you play all previous days. So far my best score is 8/10, which I achieved on the first day. I have played about a month of older entries and I have not equaled my previous score, so I guess it's all downhill from here.
Anyway, you should play it. It's fun!
lysimache introduced me to one of those daily web games that has apparently been going for a while, but she just found out about it recently: Catfishing.It is a Wikipedia-based game, sort of like Redactle. Redactle, as you may know, gives you one redacted Wikipedia entry per day, and you unredact the entry by guessing words that you think appear in it, until you have guessed enough words to be able to guess the name of the entry.
Catfishing is like a reverse, shortened version of that. Instead of the article itself, you get a list of all the categories the article appears in, some of which make it much more obvious than others (e.g., "Les Misérables characters, Fictional mayors, Fictional outlaws, Fictional French people, Fictional French criminals, Literary characters introduced in 1862, Fictional characters from the 19th century, Fictional thieves, Fictional Catholics, Food theft") and then you have to use that information to guess the name of the article. (e.g., "Jean Valjean").
(Both Redactle and Catfishing have some kind of minimum notability threshold implemented somehow, so it's generally going to be something you have heard of, or something you will feel like you probably should have heard of.)
Every day you get ten new articles to guess, and they will let you play all previous days. So far my best score is 8/10, which I achieved on the first day. I have played about a month of older entries and I have not equaled my previous score, so I guess it's all downhill from here.
Anyway, you should play it. It's fun!
