Wikipedia: List of lists of lists

I wished this was "Outline of outlines of outlines". I used to seek out those articles a lot in my free time when I was a student. It only made my hunger of knowledge grow.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_computer_programming
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_computer_science
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_mathematics
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_history
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_law
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_biology
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_science

etc.

One positive thing about Wikipedia lists: they provide a great way to explain Russell's Paradox. A lot of people have trouble with the concept of a set containing itself, but not with a web page linking to itself. So, we can imagine defining a Wikipedia page of the list of all lists which do not link to themselves, and then ask - does this list page contain a link to itself? Two cases:

(1) The page does link to itself, in which case it is wrongly present in the list of lists which do not link to themselves.

(2) The page does not link to itself, in which case it should be present in the list of lists which do not link to themselves.

Since both cases result in a contradiction, this means we cannot define the list of all lists which do not link to themselves, and thus any formal language (now called "naive set theory") which allows us to define such a set is logically inconsistent.

The solution to this paradox was to use a set of axioms (most commonly the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms) which do not allow the construction of such a contradictory set, while also maintaining all the expressive power of naive set theory.

To anyone interested in this stuff (plus Gödel) I highly recommend the graphic novel Logicomix.

Better yet, this iteratively deepening list of land-lake layers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_island#Islands_within_lak...

This culminates in:

  The largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an 
  island is a nameless, approximately 4.0-hectare (10-acre) 
  island at 66.687°N 70.479°W, situated within Nettilling Lake 
  on Baffin Island, Canada.`

My favorite Wikipedia list is its list of unusual articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_articles

Reminds me (and I'm sure others had the thought) of the Awesome GitHub repo[0] which links to many of the other Awesome-* repos.

[0] https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome

A lot of these “lists of lists” are just “Something A-M” and “Something N-Z”. That’s just a paginated list!

someone should add a list of lists of genes and subindex them all the way down. Just ruin that page.

That is so meta.

so very lispy