For Rauwerda, Wikipedia has always been more about entertainment rather than academic work: spending hours clicking on one link after another, getting lost in rabbit holes.
“Wikipedia is the best thing on the internet," she told The New York Times. "It's what the internet was supposed to be. It has this hacker ethos of working together and making something.”
At first, only her friends were following her account but it received a lot of attention when she posted about the influencer Caroline Calloway, who was upset that the post featured an old version of her Wikipedia page that said her occupation was "nothing." Rauwerda apologized, and Ms. Calloway later boosted the account on her own Instagram.
As mentioned, Rauwerda has since expanded her project and now she also sells merchandise (such as a coffee mug emblazoned with an image from the Wikipedia entry for "bisexual lighting") and hosts live shows.
Her followers often suggest her Wikipedia pages to feature, but she's become hard to impress. "If it's a fun fact that's been on the Reddit home page, I'm definitely not going to repost it," she said.
"For example, there are only 25 blimps in the world. I've known about that for a long time, and it went around Twitter a couple of days ago. I was shocked. I was like, 'Everyone knows this.'"
She has to be this choosy because many of her followers expect 'depths of wikipedia' to give them something they haven't seen before.
"I just love to learn stuff, especially these strange photos and things I could never find on my own,” 15-year-old high school student Gabe Hockett told The New York Times. He said his favorite posts from the account include 'The Most Unwanted Song' and the 'Dave Matthews Band Chicago River incident.'
Jen Fox, 22, said that trading posts from the account with her boyfriend has become their "special, nerdy love language" as well as a litmus test for friendships.
When Ms. Fox, a copywriter, moved to San Francisco in February, she would mention the account to new people she met, and if they were familiar with it, they would start DM-ing each other and sharing their favorite posts, which felt like they were really solidifying a concrete friendship.
Talking to The Michigan Daily, Rauwerda said that she started receiving so many DMs that she can't even read them all.
"When I post a lot of stories and I start getting story responses, then it gets to be a lot. It's so nice because all these people are usually sending really sweet and thoughtful things. I definitely try to acknowledge them, maybe like the message, but unfortunately, I just don’t have enough time and diligence to send something heartfelt back to everyone."
The majority of DMs she receives are people saying things like, "Oh, you should definitely post about this," and we would not believe how many repeats there are if she told us.
"At this point, I’ve posted something like 700 different things, and so many of the things people submit are things that I’ve already posted. But then other times people will send things that are really interesting, and sometimes I’ll be like 'Oh, I gotta save that for later.'"