If I play a slightly different game where I click the first link that I feel like clicking, then I always end up at the Ultraviolet Catastrophe.
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I was wondering what would be the least likely article to lead to ‘Philosophy’. I found out that ‘Donald Trump’ leads to an instant loop.
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That this is novel to a bunch of people means…
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It’s worth pointing out that while “philosophy” is a big broad subject with implications for all kinds of knowledge, it’s only the Inevitable Word by virtue of a few very contingencies. One of them is that the main “feeds” into it, other big-topic articles, are going to be pretty ossified in the text of their first paragraph. You’ll be more likely to have your edits for the “idea” page accepted if you’re adding a little nuance three pages down than if you’re trying to reframe the whole concept in the first sentence. So this may be true now, when Wikipedia is a hundred bajillion pages, because it was true when it was merely a few zillion.
Another is Western cultural influence. “Philosophy” is not only broad in its definition today, it’s been a catchall category for lots of abstract concepts in lots of different times, and most of those senses survive in the English word. I don’t know if you get the same result from zh.wikipedia.com (Chinese-language Wikipedia) but if that site had developed in a vacuum (no borrowing from the English-language version) you might very well have gotten a different Great Attractor.
And finally (he said, driving home the point nobody asked for), some of this derives from the basic template for writing these articles. Best Wikipedia practices are to start with as general an overview of relevant concepts as possible, situating your topic in terms of the classes of things it belongs to. That’s going to skew towards the abstract and broadly-defined.
Now, you may ask, why do I care? Because I’m a history professor. If I’m not undermining philosophy, what am I even doing with my life.
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30 Clicks to get from “Belize Defence Force” to “Philosophy” – mostly through languages/communications/thought sorts of pages.
18 or so clicks from Robert Goulet.
Absolutely. All excellent points.
This amusing property of Wikipedia is just that- an amusing property of Wikipedia. It’s the six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game that you can play on any sufficiently large data set with a minimum amount of connectome density. Provable by any graph theory student. Still fun, though!
That “Philosophy” ends up being the Kevin Bacon in this particular graph says (as you say) much more about the unexamined biases and editorial policies of Wikipedia than anything about the fundamental nature of human knowledge.
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Click the first link on a Wikipedia page. Repeat. Eventually, you’ll end up on “Philosophy”
That statement implies certainty. I sense Logical Positivism is at work here.
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A fruit loop?
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It was difficult not winding up in the Science branch, or even the Fact branch. And Anal beads don’t loop with this tool – has somebody changed the article?
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You’re not following the rules correctly. It’s the first link that isn’t italicized or in parenthesis. Science then goes to Scientific Method, which after 16 more links goes to Philosophy.
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Either some of the articles have been changed, or OP wasn’t playing the game correctly. Anal beads goes to Law after 11 clicks, which goes to Science after 11 more clicks, which then goes to Philosphy after 16 more.
That’s a longer chain to get to Philosophy than anything that I could come with, which was Guernica (36 links to get to Philosophy).
Surgery > Surgical Instruments > Surgery is a closed loop.
Very odd. The tool mentioned by @Purplecat above thinks that the first link in surgical instrument is “scalpel.”
Actually, it depends on where you start from. Here it thinks it “hemostat”:
What’s odd is that I can’t find any history of the page “surgical instrument” that contains anything but “surgery” as the first link, as far back as May 2011 which is apparently when this tool was created. So it’s not just a caching question.
Is this tool deliberately avoiding closed loops by picking the next option? That’s a bit unfortunate if true.
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It may be. I tried it on the Donald Trump example and it jumped to another link.
Must have a no-backsies detector
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Yeah, that seems a bit of a cheat if it skips the link you came from. I guess you’d get a lot of closed loops like that if you didn’t.
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ah! It seems Xeper cheats.
The first link on Human sexuality is Human sexual activity (forming a loop), but the second link (inside the first ref) is Marshall Cavendish. Seems a bit strange to be counting links inside refs, I’d have said the second link is biological.
Of course they get stuck in a loop. That’s what they’re there for.
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Ok, it even says so on the landing page at Xeper:
There are some circumstances where a loop is detected up the chain. This is relatively rare. If it finds that it moves to the next link in the chain.
Still, it would be nice if there was some indication when this happens. Like a red dot instead of a green, for example.
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36 pages for Dr Gay Hitler.
