An interview with Annie Rauwerda, the queen of the Wikipedia rabbit hole

Welcome to Small Talk, a series where we catch up with the internet's favorite Extremely Online individuals offline.

Annie Rauwerda is committed to the quest for useless knowledge.

In April 2020, the 21-year-old University of Michigan student created the @depthsofwikipedia Instagram account. For those unfamiliar with the intriguing online space, it's where Rauwerda posts screenshots of particularly weird, funny, and obscure Wikipedia pages. She's featured pages for terms and phrases such as the "friendship paradox," an idea that your friends all have more friends than you; "goblincore," a feral coziness that Mashable's written about in depth; and my personal favorite, "desire path," aka a path created by foot traffic.

The @depthsofwikipedia Instagram account now has more than 382,000 followers, and Rauwerda's created a sister TikTok account and runs two spinoff Instagram accounts — @depthsofcraigslist and @depthsofamazon, which is no longer operational — with her friend from high school.

What started as a quarantine project is now a beloved corner of the internet that teaches followers invaluable wacky trivia on the regular. I called Rauwerda to chat about her longtime love of Wikipedia, which of her posts get the most traction, and her favorite niche places on the internet.

Mashable: So you did Wikiracing in middle school. Tell me about that.

Annie Rauwerda: In middle school and high school I would race my friends from destination to destination on Wikipedia. You start at an article — something random like "A$AP Rocky" — and then you click the hyperlinks to get to a destination like "chicken hypnotism" or something like that. It was a really fun way to see how massive Wikipedia really is. Even though I didn't start editing Wikipedia until many years after that, Wikiracing got me a lot more interested in and appreciative of Wikipedia.

Was Wikiracing the start of you being an Extremely Online Individual?

I've always loved the internet. My parents were understandably skeptical about letting me careen on the internet unsupervised, so Wikipedia was a somewhat safe space. I was allowed to Wikirace quite a bit.

I have a diary entry from when I was in sixth grade where I wrote about Wikipedia. It's so funny: "I read the whole page about milk. I am going to be an expert in milk now. Tomorrow, I'm going to the same thing, but with McDonald's."

I looked back on it recently, and it made me laugh because I guess I've always liked collecting knowledge that might not always be useful.

Rereading old journal entries is always funny. It gives you some real insight into what you thought was interesting enough to document.

I think most of my journal entries were about my crush and about wanting to wear eyeshadow and stuff, and then randomly I would write about the history of pasteurization.

I feel like Wikipedia was so villainized in middle school when I was being taught how to use the internet. Teachers would be like, "Never look at Wikipedia for anything." It wasn't until college that professors started to acknowledge that Wikipedia is a really good starting point.

There are probably two reasons for that. One is that Wikipedia is 20 years old. In the early days, Wikipedia was kind of the Wild West, and there was a lot of random riffraff on Wikipedia. So it makes sense that 10 years ago, when I was in middle school, librarians were more skeptical.

I think the other reason is that when you're younger it is so easy to plagiarize. So I can kind of understand why they would want to steer you away from a site that so clearly presents information. Whereas in college, it is such a good tool. It's a launchpad to other sources. But Wikipedia has never said that it is authoritative. It's a great place to find good sources, like in their citations. But you should still take anything you read on Wikipedia, even though it is super reputable, with a grain of salt.

What inspired you to start @depthsofwikipedia?

In quarantine, I was super bored. Everyone was starting projects, and I decided I was going to record my favorite trivia facts I found on Wikipedia. I started in April 2020. For the first two months it was just me and my friends, and I posted a lot of random pages. I didn't really have strict criteria. A few months later I just kept posting every single day, and eventually it just gained a lot of followers. Ever since then it's been exponential growth — between one and five percent per week.

I discovered you on TikTok, not Instagram. When did you start using TikTok?

I made the TikTok account in January 2021, and I posted a little bit. Then I started really posting in the summer of 2021. Now, I try to post a couple videos a week.

TikTok is definitely a little bit more effort than posting on Instagram. And my Instagram following is bigger. It's like 370,000. Whereas TikTok is 90,000. I think TikTok is fun, and I like the way you can use sound and timing, but it's definitely more effort to make a post.

Was it weird to transition to TikTok and to start showing your face?

Yeah, definitely. I was never fully anonymous. I would put my face on my Instagram Stories, and I linked my personal page in my bio. I never wanted to be anonymous, but it was definitely a mental barrier to get over to put my face in front of everything.

You're a senior at University of Michigan. Do people recognize you on campus?

They do, and it's so fun for me. It's always in really random places, like sometimes I'll be in the library and someone will look at me for a little bit too long. And then they'll be like, "Do you have a TikTok?" I'll be like, "Yeah, I do." At the farmers' market someone recognized me, and then to thank me for "free entertainment" she gave me a bunch of free produce. It was amazing.

That's awesome. How do you balance running your account with your coursework? Is it a huge time commitment?

Finding the Wikipedia articles isn't as much time now, because people will send me interesting articles. The user submissions are amazing. I still spend a lot of time doing schoolwork. I think I've probably sacrificed my social life maybe more than I should. But honestly, @depthofwikipedia stuff is what I do in my leisure time, because it's just so fun to me. I think that's like my main leisure activity, even though sometimes it feels a little bit like work.

Before user submissions how were you finding Wikipedia pages to post?

I would click the link in the "See Also" section. Or I would look at trivia and then I would see if I could find that trivia on Wikipedia. And that's kind of how I did it. I would just spent a long time collecting random articles.

Now I get probably 30 to 50 user submissions per day. That said, a lot of the submissions just don't really make the cut.

What is your criteria?

At least half of submissions are things that I've already posted. But then on top of that, the things that do well on Instagram and TikTok are things that are somewhat relatable. People love to share posts that have this element of like, "That is so me." So that's one thing that I look for.

Also, if things require too much reading to be interesting then I won't post them, because on Instagram and TikTok it has to be quick. People are scrolling, and so to hold attention — if there's like a really big boring lead-in — it's harder to get people to invest.

Did you get into any other hobbies during the pandemic?

I moved to New York, because my classes were online and I found a really cheap sublet. That's not really a hobby, but that was a fun thing. I'm back in Ann Arbor, Michigan, now. But I kind of miss New York.

As the pandemic was letting up and people were getting vaccinated, comedy started back up in New York and I started doing some comedy shows that were heavily inspired by @depthsofwikipedia.

How were your comedy sets inspired by @depthsofwikipedia?

I use a PowerPoint with Wikipedia screenshots and then I add commentary.

You also had internet beef with Caroline Calloway right?

I posted a screenshot of Caroline Calloway's Wikipedia page that said, "Occupation: nothing." She was upset about that and reposted it to her grid and talked about how sex work is work.

At that point I was shocked that she noticed, because I had only 1,000 or 2,000 followers. So I made an apology, and she quickly forgave me and reposted a bunch of things to her stories saying like, "Oh, this is a cool account. You should follow it." After that I got a lot of followers.

Who followed your account that you fangirled over the most?

John Mayer.

When did he follow it?

In December 2020. Oh, also Troye Sivan. He followed really early when I had like 5,000 followers.

Oh damn. How did you decide to start the @depthsofamazon and @depthsofcraigslist accounts?

I think I just saw enough funny things on Amazon and Craigslist that I was like, "Why not make spin-offs. My friend from high school, Hajin Yoo, helps run those.

What are some internet trends or phenomena that you've been interested in lately?

There was a TikTok of a lady doing a mock college tour, which was really funny.

There's a TikTokker that does trivia. He'll say a bunch of things that happened in the same year and you have to try and guess what the year was as quickly as you can.

There's an Instagram account that posts 1970s cookbook recipes that are really fun, and retro, and weird.

I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters that make me feel very inspired every day.

Which are your favorite?

That's so hard, maybe like Today in Tabs and Garbage Day. They always have funny internet phenomena. And I also have a newsletter, which is based on trivia, and the internet, and Wikipedia. And it's not only Wikipedia facts, but it's a lot of facts from Wikipedia.

And what's your newsletter called?

Depths Of...

I saw the article you wrote about the Facebook college roommate pitch, which is the blurb people write on Facebook when trying to find a freshman year roommate. I've noticed a lot of that kind of thing has switched over to Instagram.

Yeah. I think that things have really changed in the five years since I got a roommate, because I agree. I think that people will stalk each other's Instagram profiles, and that's the biggest determining factor.

I guess in all the posts they had their Snapchat usernames and Instagram handles. When I did the AI, the AI would generate variations of their names for their fake username, which was really funny.

I also loved your personal website and the way you have the list of links you like. That's such a smart way to organize articles that you're interested.

Yeah, I literally just do that for myself. And it's the best thing ever because occasionally people will email me and be like, "Hey, I was inspired by your list. Here are some things that you should add." I kind of do solicit that, but it's like the best thing ever. It's like, "Oh my god, these are amazing and I never would have found them."

One person sent [a link to] the Internet Archive. There's this massive repository of the soundtrack to Kmart in the '90s because some guy saved them. It was his job. He would get these recordings from Kmart to play in the store in the '90s and when the month was done he would just save them. It's like elevator music. But then interspersed you have like, "Check out our new flannel shirts that are only $7.48 or whatever." It's really funny to listen to.