My kids aren’t playing Pokemon GO yet, but the older one had heard enough about it that he started reading up about it. When I looked at the screen after he’d been on the computer, I encountered this incredible wall of text.
Illustration by Sam Woolley
The Wikipedia references for Pokemon GO, which has been available for less than a month, are too extensive to fit into a single browser window. When I took that screen shot yesterday, there were 188 of them. There are, as of time of writing, 191.
For comparison, here’s a look at Wikipedia’s endnotes on the Bible:
The Bible, the most widely circulated book of all time, a text assembled and scrutinised and debated over the course of millennia, has 113 endnotes. There are 78 fewer points of citation on Wikipedia’s page about the Bible than there are on its page about Pokemon GO.
Baseball, America’s previous pastime, has 188 citations at the moment. It was tied with Pokemon GO yesterday but has now fallen behind.
Here are some other Wikipedia entries that have fewer endnotes than Pokemon GO:
- Tuberculosis: 166 endnotes
- Imperialism: 103 endnotes
- Charity (practice): 25 endnotes
- Masturbation: 141 endnotes
- Space Invaders: 132 endnotes
- Pokemon: 114 endnotes.