Catfishing Today Past Stats Support Settings Help Stats Support Settings Help

Contents

How to play

  • On Wikipedia, each article is in a number of categories. Guess the article title from its categories.
  • Don’t worry about capitalisation, accent marks, or anything in brackets.
  • If you had the right answer but got the title wrong, tap
  • It’s a challenging test of general knowledge. On average, players score 3 or 4 out of 10.

Articles and categories

  • The game has over 5,500 articles, curated from player suggestions, the Vital Articles project, and popular pages.
  • 10 articles are picked at random each day. Once picked, an article won’t be picked again for at least 18 months.
  • Each article is in at least four categories, and is the only article in those categories. To avoid giveaways, categories which have any non-trivial words in common with the title are removed.
  • If an article doesn’t make sense, tap and I will review it.

Guesses and answers

  • Many alternatives to the exact title are accepted. Specifically, any aliases on Wikidata and any word or phrase which Wikipedia redirects to the article.
  • If your guess is within a few letters of the correct title or an alternative, the game asks Did You Mean the correct title.
  • We generally accept surname-only answers for real-life people – unless the full name is necessary to distinguish from incorrect answers. For example, a question about North Korean leaders would not accept Kim alone.

Frequently asked questions

  • How are the articles picked?
  • First, I reviewed about 21,000 articles and accepted around 5,500.
  • Then, every day, the game automatically picks 10 of these at random. If one happens to be linked to current events, that’s a coincidence!
  • To keep days varied, the picker skips any article that shares categories with other articles in today’s or yesterday’s set (apart from a few very broad categories like Living people).
  • On rare occasions, I’ll hand-pick 10 themed articles for “special” days such as 25 December or 1 April.
  • Which categories are displayed?
  • Categories are retrieved from Wikipedia and stored in the game database; they are not ‘live’. This prevents a question from ‘breaking’ if an editor later adds a giveaway category or removes an essential one.
  • Some categories are filtered out:
    • ones that share a non-trivial word with the title (excluding any disambiguation);
    • ones that match the article title (excluding any disambiguation), or its singular or plural form – e.g. Fruit bat and Fruit bats for the article Fruit bat;
    • internal Wikipedia categories, like Articles needing translation.
  • Filtering is automatic. Manual filtering would be too subjective. Categories are listed alphabetically, unlike on Wikipedia where the order is inconsistent.
  • Which answers are accepted?
  • We crowd-source answers from Wikipedia and Wikidata. As well as the title, we accept any alias on Wikidata and any word or phrase which Wikipedia redirects to the article.
  • When checking your guess, the game ignores:
    • capitalisation, punctuation, and accent marks;
    • common prefixes such as a, an, and the – but only at the start of your guess;
    • anything in brackets – so just guess Africa, not Africa (Toto song).
  • A small number of aliases and redirects are not accepted as answers:
    • those that are also shown as categories;
    • phrases like ‘capital of …’, ‘currency in …’, or ‘national anthem of …’. The guess capital of Ireland won’t be marked correct for the article Dublin.
  • Does the game repeat articles? Have I seen this article before?
  • The game has never picked the same article twice. However, it does include similar articles, and different articles that accept the same answer.
  • How can I improve an article’s categories or answers?
  • You can edit categories on Wikipedia, and edit aliases on Wikidata. Make sure these are genuine edits which comply with Wikipedia’s policies. Then let me know (edits aren’t automatically picked up). Thank you for contributing to Wikipedia and Catfishing!
  • Can I suggest an article?
  • Thanks for your interest! Most of the articles in the game were suggested by players. Suggestions closed in March 2025, once we had built up 18 months’ worth of articles.
  • Why are some articles retired?
  • A small number of articles are retired if they proved too hard, or were widely reported by players. Retired articles won’t be picked again. Until December 2024, retired articles were also hidden, meaning some days have fewer than 10 articles. In the results emoji, ⚫ represents a hidden article.

Keyboard shortcuts

Page Key Action
Home Enter Start today’s game
Question Enter Enter guess, or accept Did You Mean
CtrlEnter Skip, or reject Did You Mean
Answer Enter Next question
c Toggle Close Enough
r Report bad article
w Open Wikipedia article in new tab
Completed c Copy results emoji 🐈🐟

Community

Support the game

  • If you’d like to support the game, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi.
  • Your support is much appreciated. Caffeine keeps me improving the game, powers the server, and the cats and fish seem to like it too. There’s absolutely no obligation. Thank you! ❤️ — Matthew

Contact the author

Credits

Further credits and licensing
  • Article titles, categories, and text are sourced from Wikipedia, created by Wikipedia contributors, and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • Article thumbnail images are sourced from Wikimedia Commons. All images are available under free-content licenses. Attribution and license information is sourced from the Wikimedia Commons API and displayed on the same page as the image.
  • Article aliases are sourced from Wikidata, licensed under CC0.
  • Alegraya and Alegreya Sans by Juan Pablo del Peral for Huerta Tipográfica, Open Font License.
  • Golden Nile Catfish illustration by Edme-François Jomard, public domain.
  • SVG icons by 480 Design, CC BY 4.0.
  • Close un oeuf joke by Stephen.

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