Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

http://matpalm.com/blog/2011/08/13/wikipedia-philosophy/

by tbull007 • 15 years ago

289 47 15 years ago

duien• 15 years ago

By the time I looked at this, the end path had changed, as "Fact" now leads to "Truth" instead of "Information". How long until someone intentionally manipulates the chain?

mat_kelcey2• 15 years ago

I was using the 2011-07-22 set so the data's already a bit stale...

Steko• 15 years ago

My first theory was to edit a few articles including one point of the post-Science chain before Philosophy so that it got into a loop and it looked like all of Wikipedia led to Trilateral Commission.

starwed• 15 years ago

When I first read the xkcd comic, I was amused that the article on philosophy didn't lead to itself. (It got trapped in a 2-cycle.)

Then I noticed that this was only because of an edit someone had made earlier in the day...

p9idf• 15 years ago

the author doesn't capitalize his sentences. i didn't find it difficult to read and only noticed halfway through the article. supposedly, capitalized sentences are easier to read, so i wonder if i've been conditioned by the internet to find uncapitalized sentences easy to read as well. off-topic, but interesting.

mat_kelcey2• 15 years ago

oh your irony...

gsivil• 15 years ago

I was about to to link to previous discussions of the same claim/question

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592522

But then I read the article... Very nice!

RobertHubert5• 15 years ago

Just tested it for the hell of it, started with "FireFighter", thought it was random... and 30 clicks later landed on Philosophy! Fun stuff.

RobertHubert5• 15 years ago

Tried the word Stupid... Just got stuck in a loop.

EDIT: Tried it again... Stupid - Philosophy = 11

Rusky• 15 years ago

Someone did that a while ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587352

Seems the actual script is gone but there may be a new version in the comments.

JoshTriplett• 15 years ago

Someone previously created a "steps to philosophy" site (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587352), but it seems to have vanished.

westicle• 15 years ago

Project HN: Identify all non-confirming Wikipedia articles and edit them to fit the pattern.

maeon32• 15 years ago

It's kind of like zooming in on what it means means to be alive in this universe. The fact that it ends at Philosophy is profound glimpse into what it means to be a thinking entity in the universe.

If we ever meet Aliens from another part of the galaxy, they would no doubt form similar knowledge structures that would probably end up being exactly like this. Their Wikipedias would end at Philosophy as well.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

I think it has more to do with how encyclopedia articles are formatted. The first sentence always describes the broader subject which the topic resides in. I view it more as zooming out from topics that matter, each time you do so you lose resolution and only see a fuzzier image.

maeon32• 15 years ago

If you make a claim, then answer it, and ask "Why" and keep doing that, then you will eventually get down to the response: "Because I said so" or "because that is how we observe it to be".

"The words and values we use to describe nature are all imprecise approximations, many are wildly wrong. We observe phenomena all around us, and if you try to describe what it is, and ask "why" enough times then you get down to the discussion of what frame of reference we use to observe the universe. We have a body of knowledge, and we tack on new observations onto that body, occasionally the body reforms and the philosophy changes. Every learner has a philosophy.

Philosophy is where the rubber meets the road in figuring out what our universe is. Is matter a particle or a wave or other, it depends on your existing perspective, your philosophy.

Retric2• 15 years ago

I think it has more to do with where people end the chain, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature is after philosophy.

Community -> Living -> Life -> Physical body -> Physics -> Natural science -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Sequence -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property (philosophy) -> Modern philosophy -> Philosophy -> Reason -> Human Nature -> Thought ->... The fact that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism tends to be the last part of the chain before it repeats is just less interesting.

PS: I suspect that most articles can be reached by every other article so you can take just about anything and say it's the "root" article for the rest of Wikipedia.

tgrass• 15 years ago

This can be tested.

I assume requiring the path from the first word was only to provide an easily replicable rule. Create a rule which chooses the fifth word (and where fewer than five links are provided, choose the last). Then compare the results to the OP's.

streblo• 15 years ago

> If we ever meet Aliens from another part of the galaxy, they would no doubt form similar knowledge structures that would probably end up being exactly like this.

That's a bold assumption. I think its arrogant to assume that 'knowledge structures' take one form, which is the one in our heads. Ever seen/read Solaris?

epscylonb• 15 years ago

I would be interested to see the same thing done with Politics.

I suspect there may be a few abstract concepts that this applies to.

dwyer• 15 years ago

Bob Dylan -> 1960s in music -> Popular music -> Music genre -> Genre -> Literature -> Art -> Senses -> Physiology -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Truth -> Reality -> Philosophy

preamble• 15 years ago

Already been done 5 months ago at http://www.xefer.com/

whacker• 15 years ago

A lot of them do, but sometimes there are loops (Eg. Computer Science). If you make an exception, choosing the second link for example, then it will lead you to philosophy.

atomicdog4• 15 years ago

If you make exceptions indiscriminately it will lead you to anything.

bluekeybox2• 15 years ago

Why philosophy? If you keep clicking, you actually end up in a loop: Philosophy -> Reason -> Human nature -> Thought -> Consciousness -> Mind -> Panpsychism -> Philosophy -> ...

I'd say, of the above, "mind", "thought", and "reason" are pretty basic -- you cannot have philosophy without a mind, for one (though you can probably have a mind without philosophy).

dimmuborgir2• 15 years ago

Saying "you cannot have philosophy without a mind" itself is one of the many philosophical concepts of mind-matter dualism.

bluekeybox2• 15 years ago

And saying what you just said is using reason.

RobertHubert5• 15 years ago

Seeing as we humans ceated Wikipedia perhaps in an effort to define and describe everything there is, the product ends up filtered through the lenses of it's creators and in doing so we inevitably end up defining what it is to be human. I dont believe we can understand or describe anything beyond what it is we are. Wikipedia is essentially the accumulation of the collective knowledge of it's creators so what else should we expect it to be outside of the definition of what it is to be man. The attempt to collect and master the understanding of everything is afterall a philosophic endeavor. Done babbling now lol.

blago• 15 years ago

You can try it for yourself: http://blago.dachev.com/wikidrill

tbull007• 15 years ago

That's great! Does it "crawl" wikipedia live?

atomicdog4• 15 years ago

The default first entry, "Human", doesn't even reach "philosophy" before the maximum of 50 steps is reached. Kinda blows a hole in the theory...

glassx• 15 years ago

It does: Human -> Living -> Biology -> Natural Science -> Branch -> Knowledge -> Facts -> Truth -> Reality -> Philosophy

yxhuvud• 15 years ago

But which of the twelve has the lowest average length? The article points to 'science', but how would the number of steps graph look then?

clemesha• 15 years ago

Related: http://TheWikiGame.com (multiplayer game of connecting Wikipedia articles with different constraints)

RobertHubert5• 15 years ago

Start: Wikipedia -> free -> artwork -> Aesthetics -> Philosophy. 4 clicks away.

fezzl• 15 years ago

It even worked when I tried "Stone Cold Steve Austin"...

clownzor• 15 years ago

I found a few that didn't go to philosophy back when the comic came out. My favorite: Han Solo -> Harrison Ford -> Han Solo...

cormullion• 15 years ago

Then, can you get from Philosophy to Mornington Crescent?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikington_Crescent

RobertHubert5• 15 years ago

What about other sites like www.conservapedia.com or www.rationalwiki.org?

I tried on conservapedia and kept winding up at Earth or stuck in a loop.

atomicdog4• 15 years ago

On Conversvapedia everything eventually leads to "Ronald Reagan".

atomicdog4• 15 years ago

Nope. You can get stuck in loops pretty easily.

stonemetal• 15 years ago

When the question came up on XKCD a little while ago the answer is "no there are several loops that don't loop through philosophy". On a more conceptual level what does it mean to lead to philosophy? First links on Wikipedia do not form a tree with philosophy as the root, after all philosophy has a first link that is not itself. So we are looking at a graph and attempting to determine if all random walks of the graph passes through point P.

Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

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