Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy
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This page is an essay, containing the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays are not Wikipedia policies or guidelines. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Clicking on the first lowercase link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets one to the Philosophy article. As of February 2016, 97% of all articles in Wikipedia eventually lead to the article Philosophy.[1] The remaining articles lead to an article without any outgoing wikilinks, to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops. This has gone up from 94.52% in 2011.[2] The median link chain length to reach philosophy is 23 and it takes 9 clicks to get to Philosophy from this page as of October 9, 2016. Notably, starting from the Philosophy article itself, it takes either 11 or 14 steps to return to it (depending on if one includes the word "outline" on the Outline of academic disciplines page), as of October 9, 2016.
There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a "classification chain." According to this theory, the Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines on how to write the lead section of an article recommend that the article should start by defining the topic of the article, so that the first link of each page will naturally take the reader into a broader subject, eventually ending in wide-reaching pages such as Mathematics, Science, Language, and of course, Philosophy, nicknamed the "mother of all sciences".
Contents
Method summarized[edit]
Following the chain consists of:
- Clicking on the first non-parenthesized, non-italicized link
- Ignoring external links, links to the current page, or red links
- Stopping when reaching "Philosophy", a page with no links or a page that does not exist, or when a loop occurs
You can see mathematician Hannah Fry demonstrate the method in the 'Marmalade', 'socks' and 'One Direction' section of the 2016 BBC Documentary The Joy of Data
Origins[edit]
The phenomenon has been known since at least May 26, 2008, when an earlier version of this page was created by user Mark J.[3] Two days later, it was mentioned in episode 50 of the podcast Wikipedia Weekly, which may have been the first public mention of it.[4]
In Popular Culture[edit]
- XKCD points out this phenomenon in comic 903, Extended Mind (in the image tooltip).
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Lamprecht, Daniel; Dimitrov, Dimitar; Helic, Denis; Strohmaier, Markus (2016). "Evaluating and Improving Navigability of Wikipedia: A Comparative Study of Eight Language Editions" (PDF). ACM. Retrieved August 17, 2016.
- ^ Ilmari Karen (June 2011). "First link". Wikipedia user page.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy". wikipedia.org.
- ^ "Wikipedia Weekly — Episode 50: Wikipedia Story". huffduffer.com.
External links[edit]
- web page that renders links graphically in a tree (detects loops and uses the second link to always complete the process)
- getting-to-philosophy (v. 2.1.0), a Node.js library that allows to query any Wikipedia page and get the different pages names that will get to "Philosophy" (also avoids loops and use the second link)
- YouTube video demonstrating this observation, which starts with random article and eventually end up in the article Philosophy
- Analysis showing that over 95% of Wikipedia articles get to Philosophy
- Cartoon at xkcd featuring the observation (see tooltip)
- WikiLoopr a tool designed to find loops when following the first link in articles.
- "The Only Way Is Essex + Wikipedia = philosophy". The Guardian.
- Amy Lee (2011-11-14). "All Wikipedia Ends In Philosophy, Literally". The Huffington Post.
