Using links to travel from one Wikipedia page to another to reach a destination page before the other participants. But there is an interesting phenomenon about them. A theory that could explain this phenomenon would be that the first link of a page tends to take the reader to a broader and more abstract topic, which will after a number of rounds lead to Philosophy.
As xkcd and others had figured out, the largest funnel is philosophy—some 7. Rather than directly connecting many ideas, the authors suggest, philosophy is a major organizing principle for the ideas represented on Wikipedia. At number two, with about 30, source pages funneling into it, is Presentation as in getting up in front of people and explaining something , followed by Tree of Life Biology and Southeast Europe. Hip-Hop Music comes in at number California desert town takes back the night, wins rare "Dark Sky" award.
True to form, Wikipedia already has an entry called " Getting to Philosophy ," which describes the phenomenon. According to Wikipedia, the effect is true for Earlier this year, the web community was reminded of the trick by web comic " xkcd ," which revealed the info when users hovered over the image with their cursors.
At the website Xefer , you can go a step further by mapping out the actual links between various terms on a radial graph, with "Philosophy" as an endpoint, like so:. The article points to 'science', but how would the number of steps graph look then? I found a few that didn't go to philosophy back when the comic came out. Why 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.
Saying "you cannot have philosophy without a mind" itself is one of the many philosophical concepts of mind-matter dualism. And saying what you just said is using reason. Reason or intuition! That's another 'philosophical' problem! You can get stuck in loops pretty easily. 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. 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. Retric on Aug 22, root parent next [—]. 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.
Most articles can be reached by every other article, but not if you are only following the first link. You can make a case that anything on the chain that leads from Philosophy back to Philosophy is the root, but anything outside of that is going to be tough to argue, in my opinion. Cushman on Aug 22, root parent prev next [—]. That's less interesting to people? Wikipedia is telling us it can think! This can be tested. I assume requiring the path from the first word was only to provide an easily replicable rule.
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