Found Wikipoetry

A fun way to make collage poems/found poems is to use fragments from random Wikipedia pages. You can follow the process below to create such poems:

1. Click on Wikipedia's random page link.
2. Choose an interesting word or phrase from the text on that page, and write it down.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you have an interesting poem.

Or, for a more focused variation:

1. Choose a category from Wikipedia's list of categories. If you're indecisive, you can get a random Wikipedia category.
2. Go to Wikipedia's random page in category link, enter the category you've chosen, and press 'Go'.
3. Choose an interesting word or phrase from the text on that page, and write it down.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have an interesting poem.

Not every iteration of this process will produce an interesting or even coherent poem. That's what makes it challenging, and fun! (Before doing this project, I did not realize how many one- or two-line Wikipedia pages there are about various species of moth.) The poems I've compiled here are the best outputs I got from doing this exercise a bunch of times.

My Wikipoems

• Duplication
• Ersatz Downtowns
• What I Know, or, Hints

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If you like this concept, you might also like the Wikipedia Haiku Bot. It's a fediverse account that posts sentences from random Wikipedia pages which happen to form haikus. I didn't create this bot, I just think it's neat.

You can also find more collage poems composed by me from other (non-Wikipedia) media on my website.