Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

http://wikiloopr.com/

by seangransee • 14 years ago

295 161 14 years ago

wikiloopr.com

anvandare• 14 years ago

Wikipedia is aware of this:

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

seangransee13• 14 years ago

i know. when i found that out, i spent half the day on wikipedia trying it out with different pages. so i built a way to automate it :)

scotttobejoking• 14 years ago

As they describe in the page, when you describe something, you are trying to place it within a general framework.

In trying to describe a domain in an encyclopedia, it does little good to use language specific to the domain. If your reader doesn't know what Biology is, it's little use trying to describe it in terms of Microbiology and Immunology. You have to use more general language.

There are are few words more general and meaningless in our language than "organization".

edit - grammar

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

Seems like it would be nice to cache some of these requests, instead of repeatedly hammering the Wikipedia API. And why is it grabbing images?

http://i.imgur.com/KSju9.png

(Incidentally, my test case for the screenshot did not lead to Philosophy!)

seangransee13• 14 years ago

totally agree. i hacked this together pretty quickly last night. definitely a lot of room for improvement. thanks for the feedback!

bloaf2• 14 years ago

It looks like there is a bug where it doesn't fetch the correct page:

http://wikiloopr.com/anime

tripzilch• 14 years ago

sorry to say, but couldn't you have thought about that before posting it on HN? you're on the front page, if your site really runs without caching, you must be wasting an enormous amount of WP's resources.

sixQuarks• 14 years ago

"Honda" only goes 3 links

seangransee13• 14 years ago

i guess i could modify it to not include bold links. notice why it's stopping there... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_company

tomelders2• 14 years ago

As does London, but it's a proper loop.

stigi• 14 years ago

http://wikiloopr.com/home Home - Residence - Home

sp3324• 14 years ago

As far as I know, this was noticed in May last year on the xkcd forums. http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309 There's a writeup of it with a gigantic picture over here: http://www.mrphlip.com/wikiphilosophy/

tonylampada• 14 years ago

Seems like there is an even older link here on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584896

sp3324• 14 years ago

OK, and this game http://spu.co/get-to-philosophy was played at least as far back as August 2010.

rolux• 14 years ago

True, the "wikipedia loop" itself is not a new discovery. But still, congrats for coming up with a nice GUI to demonstrate it!

Aldor• 14 years ago

http://wikiloopr.com/texting Yay! FInally found one that doesn't work.

DanBC• 14 years ago

That loops between philosophy and preposition.

calvinlough• 14 years ago

For me it loops between Human and Reason.

sp3324• 14 years ago

It's been modified since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_messaging...

joelverhagen• 14 years ago

When images appear first in the page's source, the wrong link is chosen. I assume you are trying to go for the first link, as a human reader would see it.

For example, the page on Anime:

http://wikiloopr.com/Anime

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anime&action=e...

seangransee13• 14 years ago

thanks! gonna fix that later

fasteddie31003• 14 years ago

This reminds me of a game I used to play as an intern with other interns to kill time. Someone would pick a Wikipedia article deep down in the bowels of Wikipedia and we would race to the article from Wikipedia only using links. We could get the article surprisingly fast, most within only 5 intermediate page visits from the homepage.

ksmiley• 14 years ago

I can't replicate it, but I encountered a weird bug. I entered "Star Trek" and hit Enter. The suggested items list appeared and I clicked on "Star Trek". Page titles appeared as normal, but everything appeared twice, like so:

  Star Trek
  Star Trek
  Cinema of the United States
  Film
  Cinema of the United States
  Recording
  Data
  Level of measurement
  Film
  ...etc until the last page title, "Reality"

Seems like two processes were running in parallel and outputting to the same stream.

xiaoma• 14 years ago

I also got a weird one:

    Anime
    Animation
    The page you specified doesn't exist

aptwebapps• 14 years ago

That's funny because the first link on the Animation page is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion

Is that an Easter Egg (illusion == doesn't exist)?

lotyrin• 14 years ago

Same thing here, also from Animation.

mildweed• 14 years ago

Epistemology reigns supreme.

eevilspock• 14 years ago

How do you know?

encoderer• 14 years ago

This is beautiful. I've always thought sites like IMDB and Wikipedia are hypertext expressions of the purest form.

As a nerdy kid, over a few years I read my way through a significant chunk of the early 1990's Groliers Encyclopedia set my Grandma bought me at Krogers. And it was never cover-to-cover reading, instead it was filled with hopping around, page-to-page, volume-to-volume. Start at oscilloscope, but what's a cathode ray? And then it's in television? How does broadcasting work? I'd sit on the floor with a half dozen open encyclopedias open around me, the same way we can do now with browser tabs.

Wikipedia has many flaws, but it's a fantastic tool and I'd have killed for it as a 12 year old with 5 volumes of an encyclopedia in my backpack!

TazeTSchnitzel5• 14 years ago

Ah yes. To me (to my productivity's detriment...) quite often when I visit Wikipedia it becomes a learning adventure. From one thing you can hop to the other, finding out all sorts of interesting and obscure things. To a curious mind like mine, Wikipedia is heaven!

pattern• 14 years ago

For myself, I would broaden this and say that almost every link I visit on HN, or every forum post I read leads to more than 1 additional link. Thus three windows of Chrome open with 10+ tabs each :)

I find this drill-down effect to be quite illuminating, if not productive. Strangely, it seems to provide both depth and breadth of topics in relatively equal measures.

dbh937• 14 years ago

Sometimes, I go onto wikipedia just to find out one fact... and end up with 6 or 7 tabs open on the topic, ranging from genetics to Judaism.

prezjordan• 14 years ago

I played with this [1] when I first started programming in Ruby. The results were super interesting (but now I regret not using the Wikipedia API...)

[1] https://gist.github.com/1654064

seangransee13• 14 years ago

about an hour after posting this, someone changed the philosophy page so the philosophy-reality loop doesn't happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy

it still brings you to a loop, but it's not an immediate back-and-forth between the last two.

jahewson• 14 years ago

I quite like the loop between Doubt and Belief http://wikiloopr.com/Doubt

guac• 14 years ago

The loop found for "Psychology" is pretty neat: http://wikiloopr.com/Psychology

Edit: Looks like somebody is editing certain articles that don't have philosophy as the first link to have it. Psychology used to loop with itself through like 5 intermediates.

tomelders2• 14 years ago

Shakespeare - 28 links. My personal best.

menacingly• 14 years ago

How does that get there slower than "fart" ??

incision• 14 years ago

MAF [1] - 30. Though, it's a bit of a cheat since the first page is surely disambiguation.

I also found M62 Locomotive [2] at 26 to be interesting.

1: http://wikiloopr.com/MAF

2: http://wikiloopr.com/M62%20locomotive

stevesearer• 14 years ago

Gorgonzola achieved 43 - http://wikiloopr.com/Gorgonzola

zyb09• 14 years ago

Nobody linked xkcd yet? Relevant Alt-Text: http://xkcd.com/903/

TapaJob• 14 years ago

"Greg James" As in Radio one DJ.....Doesnt work!

tg3• 14 years ago

Interestingly, Paul Graham [1] leads to the photographer, but still leads back to the Web before heading to philosophy/proposition.

[1] http://wikiloopr.com/Paul%20Graham

TazeTSchnitzel5• 14 years ago

It's funny, but it's true that everything in life ultimately leads back to philosophy.

As noted by XKCD, everything is based on something else: http://xkcd.com/435/

And I think after Maths on that should come Philosophy.

bloaf2• 14 years ago

"Nematode" and "Flow (psychology)" stop at "psychology" which I think is just another example of that discipline putting on airs.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 14 years ago

That's changed now, thanks to me.

user24• 14 years ago

I agree. Thought that at the time. Was a philosophy student at the time too though.

rane• 14 years ago

I don't think the loop is the interesting part, what's interesting is that articles lead to philosophy.

Bjoern• 14 years ago

Bangkok is 25 and Chopsticks loops with itself.

drewmclellan• 14 years ago

Keith Chegwin gets stuck in Great Britain, which is probably for the best.

api• 14 years ago

Either philosophy is a dead end, then, or it is the base of all knowledge. Depends on whether knowledge is a tree or a graph, which is... a philosophical question!

My brain exploded.

beala• 14 years ago

If there is some characteristic Q that is true of all knowledge, then Q must be true of Q. A cycle!

Cushman• 14 years ago

Only if Q is knowable.

jlgreco2• 14 years ago

Trees are connected acyclic graphs, so knowledge could be both. ;)

tsahyt• 14 years ago

Yes but graphs can very well be cyclic, so eventually a path from a node could lead back to the node itself.

lbarrow• 14 years ago

From a mathematical perspective, this is actually not that surprising.

Think of the act of clicking the first link in the Wikipedia article as a function that takes in the page you're on and outputs another page.

If you call this function on itself over and over again (ie use the output of one step as in the input of the next step), you will eventually enter a loop. The proof of this is simple: there are only a finite number of Wikipedia articles, therefore you must eventually reach an article you've seen before. (This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be chaotic.)

Since it's necessarily true that all articles will eventually reach a loop when you iteratively click the first link, we have to ask: how unusual is it that they usually reach the SAME loop?

jfoutz• 14 years ago

After the first few runs, i'm kinda surprised it's not a fixed point at Philosophy.

madcaptenor• 14 years ago

Back in May of 2011, it was. http://ai.stanford.edu/~west1/attractor.html

prawks• 14 years ago

Never thought about it as a finite state system, but that's a great way of looking at it.

klawed• 14 years ago

Agreed. I'd love to know how many different cycles the wikipedia article graph contains. If most articles lead to 1 out of 20 possible cycles, it's much less interesting than if it's 1 out of 5,000,000.

momotomo• 14 years ago

I've been looking to do something like this with the Networkx library in Python, though on an internal company MediaWiki with a much smaller article base. Going to try to visualise much the same thing, the major loops and cliques in the graph.

justincormack• 14 years ago

Unless the articles are edited before you come back!

johnrob• 14 years ago

Another way of thinking about it: There are N nodes that loop back to themselves. When starting at a given node, what are the odds that you'll never hit one of these N nodes? Additionally, we know that many of the N nodes are very general ones, like "truth", under which many topics roll up.

alok-g• 14 years ago

Unless an article is reached that has no link. [A dead-state in the stated finite-state machine]

dbaupp• 14 years ago

This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be chaotic

Without more information, I don't think this is true. It is true if the transition function between states depends on a finite number of previous ones (WLOG if s_n is a function of only s_{n-1}), but I think that it isn't if the transition depends on an infinite number.

(Though, in this case, clearly there is no history, so what you say is true.)

eru• 14 years ago

If your model only depends on at most a maximum fixed length of history, you can always model your finite systems to only depend on the most recent state. (Just make a copy of the history part of that state.)

In the case of depending on up to an infinite history, I wouldn't call that system to have a finite number of states any longer.

Nitramp• 14 years ago

The fact that many lead to the same loop(1) of Argument <-> Logic in unsurprising, too. Wikipedia articles usually define their subject in in the first sentence. Defining things works by saying what general category they belong to, then by differentiating them within that.

E.g.

A fish is any member of a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is an American _multinational corporation_ which provides Internet-related products and services [...]

A table is a form of _furniture_ with a flat and satisfactory horizontal upper surface [...]

And so on. If you always walk up the abstraction chain because you're picking the first link (the general category), you'll end up at the root of the categorization tree, which is likely something along the lines of Argument, Logic, Fact etc.

Note however that the current state of wikipedia has a different root loop for me, Logic leads to Philosophy.

(1) or one of a very limited number of loops, I also saw Science <-> Knowledge.

njharman• 14 years ago

I love wiki. I spend hours following links. Having loops is a feature or else I might never stop.

Greek City States ->

  Polis
  City
  Human settlement
  Statistics
  Data
  Level of measurement
  Stanley Smith Stevens
  United States
  Federalism
  Politics
  Art
  Human behavior
  Behavior
  Organism
  Biology
  Natural science
  Science
  Knowledge
  Fact
  Proof (truth)
  Argument
  Philosophy
  Problem
  Doubt
  Belief
  Proposition loops to Philosophy

zerostar07• 14 years ago

In another time it would lead to "God"

johnbender• 14 years ago

This may be hyper naive but is this the consequence of beginning most articles representing the current topic as a more specific form of another topic?

For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra

"Algebra ... is a branch of mathematics." (mathematics being a link)

So if you continue to generalize you'll end up at the most general subject which appears to be philosophy.

[update] added an example

jlgreco2• 14 years ago

That seems like a very reasonable assumption. I just randomly sampled a dozen or so articles and they all followed that theme.

dude_abides• 14 years ago

ah so thats why the degree is called Doctor of Philosophy?! Thanks for the enlightenment! I've wondered quite a lot of times why I'm a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science, and not Doctor of Computer Science.

tomjakubowski• 14 years ago

I get that this is tongue-in-cheek, but philosophy as in "Doctor of Philosophy" doesn't refer to the field of philosophy per se, but to the more general concept of "love of knowledge."

fhars• 14 years ago

Traditionally, a university had four faculties, the lower or artists faculty, and the three higher faculties of theology, law and medicine. Students would start in the artists faculty learning the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (including astrology)) to become a magister artium (M.A.) and then go to one of the higher faculties to get their doctorate (Th.D, LL.D or M.D., respectively). Philosophy and science (née natural philosophy) developed in the artists faculty and over time became important enough to grant the artists faculty the right to grant doctorates, too, with philosophy leading the way. That's why many science faculties, which split off of the artists faculty over the centuries still grant the title of a doctor of philosophy.

Ah, and the first three of the liberal arts that were the first thing a student learned, grammar, rhetoric and logic, were called the trivium, hence the modern word "trivial" for obvious things everyone should know.

leh0n• 14 years ago

http://wikiloopr.com/Gate%20City%20Bank I think this one is bugged haha

strongriley• 14 years ago

I think I beat it... http://wikiloopr.com/Caterham%20CSR

wowfat• 14 years ago

Try this http://wikiloopr.com/kumbanad

chrishas35• 14 years ago

Someone just changed the Reason page [1] which is now putting the focus on Biology instead of Philosophy.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&oldid=5...

manish_gill• 14 years ago

I remember someone on reddit posting a python script that does the same thing (following the wiki chain to Philosophy).

Amusingly, my test got stuck in a loop between Science and Natural Science. :)

freejoe76• 14 years ago

Strangely, http://wikiloopr.com/Tacos takes you to a different loop than http://wikiloopr.com/Burritos

seangransee13• 14 years ago

clearly burritos are the more logical thing to eat

andrewmunsell• 14 years ago

I got stuck in a philosophy-argument loop instead of philosophy-reality ;)

BlackJack• 14 years ago

What happens for Biology? http://wikiloopr.com/Biology. For me, it goes down until it gets to Biology, and then highlights Biology over and over.

  Biology
  Natural science
  Science
  Knowledge
  Fact
  Proof (truth)
  Argument
  Philosophy
  Problem
  Doubt
  Belief
  Proposition
  Logic
  Reason
  Human
  Mammal
  Class (biology)
  Biological classification
  Organism
  Biology

The first link on the Wikipedia page for Biology is "Biology(disambiguation)", but the first textual link is "Natural Science". I assume it loops on Biology because it keeps going back between Biology (the article) and Biology (disambiguation), but that doesn't explain why the first redirect is to Natural Science in the very beginning.

Am I just missing something here?

Edit: This no longer happens. Now it properly loops on Philosophy and Proposition.

twodayslate• 14 years ago

I thought Wikipedia hates sites like this. The do more harm than good.

dakimov• 14 years ago

Wikipedia is a dense oriented graph, no wonder it has many cycles. What's the big deal?

m3mnoch• 14 years ago

i started with "The Tyger" and got this:

  The Tyger
  William Blake
  Romanticism
  Industrial Revolution
  United Kingdom
  Britain (placename)
  Great Britain

shrug apparently, william blake is indisputable.

m3mnoch.

PuercoPop• 14 years ago

Nice demo, but I think it is an incorrect asumption that the first link is to a broader subject. For example, for Perú it says: "It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil" So Perú->Ecuador left me with a big wtf..

http://wikiloopr.com/Peru

001sky• 14 years ago

In fact, according to a crawl of the Wikipedia database from May 2011, nearly 95% of Wikipedia articles will take you back to Philosophy.

- Always interested in the backstory of folks that sit around thinking this stuff up (and then testing it).

http://www.syndiosocial.com/the-philosophy-of-networks/

jdpage• 14 years ago

Interestingly, things like "Hat", "Shoe", and "Human" end up in a Psychology/Emotion loop, rather than the Philosophy loop.

dirtyaura2• 14 years ago

After having twenty tries that got me into the philosophy loop, I started to think what are the most basic concepts that philosophy is "made of". Maybe I could escape the loop that way?

And lo and behold, I tried word "word" and it loops between "emotion" and "psychology". http://wikiloopr.com/word

TazeTSchnitzel5• 14 years ago

I fixed that.

dirtyaura2• 14 years ago

So did you edit Wikipedia to ensure the Philosophy loop?

Evgeniuz2• 14 years ago

The first word I tried — jeans — and it failed to make philosophy loop :) Apparently, any articles from generated list will fail too.

crazypyro• 14 years ago

Jeans made the philosophy loop for me?

http://i.imgur.com/rgMkh.png

Evgeniuz2• 14 years ago

Somehow there was Emotion/Psychology loop there. Now it goes even further, than yours image, the loop is Argument/Philosophy now. Clearly, wikipedia is changing or tool was enhanced :)

usea• 14 years ago

Here is a similar visualization of the phenomenon from last year http://xefer.com/wikipedia

creamyhorror• 14 years ago

This is a superior visualisation in my opinion - it actually builds you a tree of links as you enter subsequent searches. Quite interesting to see how article chains cluster into 3 or 4 different "main branches".

ianstormtaylor• 14 years ago

Except there's no autocomplete. I couldn't match Carly rae jepsen... but once you get it, it is much cooler.

sageikosa• 14 years ago

And if you go to the last link in any regular paragraph (not footnotes nor tables, nor references) you may often end up bouncing around sports teams.

JohnsonB• 14 years ago

This behaves erratically. Sometimes it considers the coordinates link, above the entire article the "first link" (in the "Michael Phelps" chain), sometimes not (Chicago). Consequentially, I believe "Michael Phelps", when the coordinate link is ignored, leads to it's own loop that is not the philosophy loop in question.

hoprocker• 14 years ago

Puts me in mind of Translation Party[1] (which is back up, kudos to WillC and Rick!). There's a lot to be entertained via this sort of vertex-following algorithm.

[1] http://translationparty.com/

joshaidan2• 14 years ago

Funny... As I was playing with this, somebody changed the order of:

"In philosophy and sociology..."

On the Agency (philosophy) page. This changed the output of the results, but in the end the loop still existed. However, I couldn't help but feel like someone is trying to hack the matrix.

clemesha• 14 years ago

I have a site: http://TheWikiGame.com that makes a game out of a related idea (finding the connection between Wikipedia articles).

Recently, I've been giving access to the game data to people (like university researchers, etc) to test different theories on path connections made by real people, etc.

The game has now been running for over 3 years, has about 1.19 million players, playing over 1.37 million games, with about 1.22 million won games (successful start/end article connection).

Got a really cool application for all the game data? I'd love to hear: alex@thewikigame.com

loumf• 14 years ago

Maybe the interesting part is the 150,000 lost games.

lachenmayer• 14 years ago

Surely most of those are just abandoned games?

ajryan• 14 years ago

I have a kind of Wiki game that I play aloud with friends. Person A names a topic. Person B must guess whether Wikipedia owns the top Google (incognito/not signed-in) result for that term. Person B gets a point for guessing right, or Person A gets a point if Person B guesses wrong. The fun is in coming up with "stumpers.'

joshaidan2• 14 years ago

Oh, I think I found one that doesn't loop:

Port Arthur http://wikiloopr.com/Port%20Arthur

Either that, I found a bug.

rogerbinns• 14 years ago

Not as dramatic but http://wikiloopr.com/Nelson ends up with Great Britain (and then claims it loops to itself with no intermediaries).

TillE• 14 years ago

Looks like a bug. Dalian should lead to Liaoning.

seangransee13• 14 years ago

yesterday, the loop was always the same. since this made it to the top of hacker news, the loop has been changing. look at the revision history of some of those pages and you'll see that people on wikipedia are messing with the loop.

kevinh• 14 years ago

I seem to have broken it here: http://wikiloopr.com/List%20of%20minor%20planets:%2075001%E2...

Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planets:_75001%E2...

That is, however, a weird Wikipedia page. It seems like the first link is a target to another location on the page, which (I'd assume) would put it in an infinite loop.

planckscnst• 14 years ago

"Egypt" also breaks.

dewarrn1• 14 years ago

Interesting find: "Sherlock Holmes" avoids the Argument/Philosophy loop; "Poirot" does not.

dkroy• 14 years ago

Are there any major articles that don't loop?

seangransee13• 14 years ago

maybe not major, but the ones i've found so far that don't do it are

http://wikiloopr.com/home http://wikiloopr.com/chopsticks http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python

seangransee13• 14 years ago

also, anything that leads to marriage http://wikiloopr.com/dating

CodeCube• 14 years ago

This is the shortest one I've found so far - http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python

seangransee13• 14 years ago

here's the shortest one i've found: http://wikiloopr.com/home

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

Works for:

* Carly Rae Jepson

* Paul is dead

* Telephony

* Easter Island

* Drum and bass

* Sunglasses

* CAT 5

* Willy Wonka

* Black hole

* Vancouver

* Cloud Cuckoo Land

* Bacon

* Radish

* Brunette

* Dunning-Kruger Effect

* Lady Gaga

* Sailor Moon

If the chain hits Philosophy first, it converges on Philosophy/Argument. If it hits Fact first, it converges on Fact/Truth.

fchollet• 14 years ago

http://wikiloopr.com/whale

"Whale" leads to the "pinniped"/"marine mammal" loop. How about that one?

d4nt• 14 years ago

"HTML5 Canvas" gets into a loop on Truth ... Fact ... Truth. Not the usual philosophy loop.

milkshakes• 14 years ago

ironically, starting at "strange loop" avoids the repetitive philosophical argument

pdx• 14 years ago

That works because somebody is being funny, and created a self referential strange loop inside Wikipedia.

That's a good find you found. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loops

sp3324• 14 years ago

Hofstadter was a genius, one of his books was called "I am a Strange Loop" and xkcd (jokingly) reported that his autobiography reads:

  I'm
  so
  meta
  even
  this
  acronym

johanbev• 14 years ago

I have to admit guilt here :-) Nice that someone found it too. +1 for GEB.

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

You have a bug. Pages like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc. (note the dot at the end) have a "geographic coordinate system" link at the top, that isn't part of the article. So queries like http://wikiloopr.com/Steve%20Jobs are actually returning wrong results.

seangransee13• 14 years ago

thanks! I'll go ahead and fix it.

bandwevil• 14 years ago

Yep, it's seeing the "Coordinates" link at the top right corner of the page.

dhughes• 14 years ago

"Lies" doesn't work.

steeleduncan• 14 years ago

I wonder if this says more about the people who write the articles or the nature of the subjects themselves?

ErrantX• 14 years ago

Guys :) This is always fun when it crops up - especially the musing on how deeply rooted the topic of philosophy is.

But please don't go editing articles to improve the loops or otherwise change them. Unless of course the change is beneficial to the article.

It's like going for a walk somewhere fascinating; enjoy the view, but leave nothing behind :)

DesaiAshu• 14 years ago

Does this hold true with following the xth link on the page? I'd predict it does, but the further x is from 1, the longer the average chain before you get to the loop (by virtue of definitions being at the top of wiki articles, then at some point the average length would hit a consistent level). Would love to see this modified to let you determine x.

wkral• 14 years ago

You could optimize this a bit by caching the loops, I noticed some pauses between Fact and Truth, seeing as how that loop always comes up it would be nice to cache it.

tantalor• 14 years ago

First two I tried led to different loops:

1. Elephant (Mammal ... Human)

2. Big Bang (Fact ... Truth)

zapt02• 14 years ago

TIL Wikipedia has a JSON API!

dinedal• 14 years ago

Looks like http://wikiloopr.com/Crystal breaks it (The loop has no other end)

seangransee13• 14 years ago

Right now it appears to be looping between Natural Science and Physics. But they're really far apart so you might not seem them on your screen at once.

pitchups• 14 years ago

I think this works for any link, not just the first link.

DelvarWorld• 14 years ago

Pseudodiarrhea gave me a unique loop.

ThisIBereave• 14 years ago

One of these, at least, is supported by a pretty weird edit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&diff=51...

godDLL• 14 years ago

http://wikiloopr.com/Sigur%20Rós did I break it?

jamescun• 14 years ago

We used to play this as a game back in high school. First one to find the loop won.

INTPenis• 14 years ago

Same but at the boring callcenter job I had at the time. Dell Enterprise support, we would get virtually no calls sometimes and we would make up shit to find on wikipedia and whoever found it from a specified starting point in the least amount of jumps won.

bayesbiol• 14 years ago

WikiRaces! https://twitter.com/wikiraces

scurvyscott• 14 years ago

"booger" doesn't do it. Just sayin.

pohl• 14 years ago

Here's one that - if executed on the Federation computer on board the Starship Enterprise - would make smoke and sparks fly from the terminal...

http://wikiloopr.com/Reince%20Priebus

zerop• 14 years ago

All roads lead to Mathematics answers it -- http://www.xamuel.com/all-roads-lead-to-mathematics/

JacobIrwin• 14 years ago

'television' was the first search term I could find that broke the loop - on the fifth or sixth attempt

svdad• 14 years ago

I think this is fairly trivially explained in most cases by the fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Almost by construction, nearly every article starts with "X is a Y" (modulo grammatical niceties) where Y is a more general class to which X belongs. In cases when the article doesn't follow that form, the first linked term is usually still explanatory or definitional in some sense and hence more general, and cases where that doesn't apply (e.g. Obstacle) are unusual enough that they don't generally break the cycles. There are no "Wikipedia axioms" that I know of, so this is pretty much guaranteed to end in a cycle looping through a limited set of terms used to talk about abstract concepts. Hence Philosophy.

urza2• 14 years ago

Few days ago, when this was on MainPage, it ended in different loop than now.

Today most articles ends in cycle between Philosophy and Modern Philosophy.. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_philosophy )

few days ago, it was cycling between Philosophy and Agency ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy) )

What changed and why?

urza2• 14 years ago

Aha, someone changed the first link on page Problem from purpose to obstacle.

Its a little bit like butterfly effect :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Problem&action...

Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

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