Similar to Wordle but for an entire Wikipedia page, Redactle

Redactle is large; Wordle is little. Redactle gives you the whole blacked-out Wikipedia page, not just a stub, while Wordle asks you to decipher a single five-letter word. You can make as many guesses as you want, one word at a time. You can start out with a ton of freebies, including terms like "was," "and," and "for." Then why is it so difficult?

The whole point is to identify the precise person, thing, or location that the piece is about. Knowing a few often used letters will often get you most of the way there in Wordle; if I get some hits on letters like E, T, and R, there isn't much work left to do. But is it really helpful to know that "he" appears 159 times in Redactle? Maybe. Kind of.

Redactle gameplay experience

I'll demonstrate a game I played the day before (no spoilers for today). The page was lengthy, which was expected given that it was pulled from one of Wikipedia's 10,000 essential pages. As a result, it's unlikely to be a stub or include anything too obscure or unknown.

Although the majority of the words in the headings were blacked out, the structure of a Wikipedia page was clear because to the huge type headings. The bulleted list contained numerous references to "The ____ of _____" and "Concerning the ______," which hinted that this article might be about a prolific author. Also, since the words are written in monospace, you can make educated assumptions about their lengths even if you don't know what they might be.

But is it about a person? There is no space for a first or last name in the title, which only has one word. The first few words had hyphens in between them, which reminded me of those names with French hyphens.

With "birth" as my first word, I received three hits. hence, a person. On a whim, I entered "France," and I received 19 hits. Twenty results for "book" were returned, but only three for "author," and none were in the opening sentence, which indicates what a person is best known for. I discovered that I was trying to find a balance between specific, uncommon terms (which would give more depth) and frequent words that frequently appear in bios (which would be more likely to be hits). There were a few results for "king," thus the French, British, and American revolutions immediately came to mind. Yet there aren't many for "England" or "America." I chose "woman" because I anticipated hearing a lot of "first woman to do such-and-such" while describing a famous female. a hit. So I gave "he" a shot and came up with 159, including many in the introduction. Well, it's a guy. "Playwright," "Spain," "medicine," "1700," or "1800" returned no results. After some consideration, I chose to focus on the French connection and made the guesses "French" (34 hits), "revolution" (2 hits), and "enlightenment" (8 hits). The first statement contained enlightenment.

Come on, there are only so many Enlightenment men who are well-known enough to have Wikipedia entries on them. Let's try a well-known person; perhaps a miss will reveal a reference to a partner or inspiration. Voltaire? Yep. The entire article was made public. I correctly predicted it 46 times for an accuracy of 89.13%.

Redactle is how difficult?

Despite the fact that I found it challenging and annoying, my score from yesterday was rather close to the median (43, per the day's statistics). Every day, everyone receives the identical puzzle, but some days will be more difficult than others, similar to Wordle. Several users on a Reddit thread about the game mention needing 250 guesses to figure out a challenging entry.

When will a new Redactle be released?

Every day at 11 a.m. CDT, which is noon Eastern Time, new puzzles are released.

Which approach works better for Redactle?

I'm learning as I go, I guess. I'll probably try using more precise words in the future; "enlightenment" and "revolution" would have made better phrases to use after "France" instead of hail-marys to play late in the game.

In addition, I'm going to start paying more attention to the headings and descriptions of persons and objects in Wikipedia pages. It turns out that, for instance, Voltaire was referred to as a "writer" rather than a "author."