Wikipedia: 97% of all articles lead to Philosophy | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia: 97% of all articles lead to Philosophy

en.wikipedia.org

47 pointsdiginova18 comments

> There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a "classification chain".

I've not heard people talk about it, but it seems like there's a model of information in the Dewey classification system, where 000 includes information systems and general reference itself, then 100 is philosophy, all the way up to 900, which is history. It's something like abstract ("information" to concrete ("real, specific things that happened"). By this theory, it makes sense that moving up the classification chain would take you to Philosophy, if you go far enough. But if that's what was happening, I'd expect it to keep going beyond Philosophy into the 000s.

Maybe, maybe not. Rather than admit my theory is wrong, I'll just pretend that the substrate on which Philosophy articles are built is Wikipedia, the internet, and other information organizing systems. Thus, all Philosophy articles on Wikipedia have an implied link above them in the classification chain. Phew, crisis averted.

The 97% number was true in 2016, but is no longer the case after an edit to Awareness that switched the order of Psychology and Philosophy:

> After an edit to the Awareness article in May of 2024, among others switching the order of Philosophy and Psychology, the amount of articles that lead to Philosophy this way has been greatly reduced, as Awareness and Psychology form a loop of their own.

The title of the actual linked page is "Getting to Philosophy", which should have been the title as submitted.

Edit: someone from this HN thread found a way to break the cycle, so 97% is back for now!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thought&action=...

If the chosen stopping point was some other category, would the percentage be lower? Or is this merely a phenomenon that you can eventually reach any category by repeatedly clicking on the first link?

it's not exactly chosen to be the stopping point also check out the video mentioned in comment which explains how the centrality, being in a big loop and being a high indegree node leads to this behaviour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-llumS2rA8I

(i didn't watch the video but) The method section in the wiki page says

> 3. Stopping when reaching "Philosophy", or a page with no links, or when a loop occurs[4]

So, philosophy is explicitly chosen by the method as the "positive" occurrence vs its absence. If this is not the case, then wiki is doing a bad job explaining I think.

As I recall, philosophy is somewhat of a “fixed point”, or attractor. Wherever you start, you’ll land on philosophy, and stay there. You won’t random walk far away again.

It makes sense. After all, philosophy is concerned with the fundaments of knowledge, so an article on a knowledge sharing platform could be consistently near philosophy.

Okay I will play this game without a crawler. i looked up UFC fighter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khabib_Nurmagomedov. Then you see oh his personal life says he's a Muslim, that leads to islam article, Quran, religious text, religions, Philosophy of religion,Ethics, then philosophy!

Today's featured article, Cyclone Taylor, goes to an Ancient Greek -> Greek Language loop.

Today's top in the news link, Iberian lynx, leads off site (to Wiktionary) on the first link.

I've tried getting to philosophy years ago and it was reliable--but what's up now?

I think they almost broke about 25% of all articles by changing the link in the Awareness article recently from philosophy to psychology

Philosophy itself goes to Ancient Greek. Following the rules in the Wikipedia article, I found Ancient Greek led to Philosophy again. Actually the first link in the Ancient Greek article is [hellɛːnikɛ́ː], but this is parenthesized, so the rules say to ignore it: "Parentheses would pick up language links that quickly railroad the subject, such as Txorierri line linking to Basque language instead of Narrow-gauge railway". However following such links does also lead eventually to a different Philosophy and Ancient Greek loop. The last article I read was that on the Chodzony, or Polonez, which also leads to Philosophy.

Makes sense, because everything starts with philosophy.

Yeah, building a repository of knowledge naturally leads to the question of "how do we define knowledge"?

As would 97% of all conversations, if people had the patience, curiosity, and lack of anything immediately productive to do.

Related > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-llumS2rA8I by @not_David

I mean if you keep asking why you eventually get to a point where you hit the limits of human knowledge and then have to make do with subjective opinions aka philosophy.

That's not how I would characterize philosophy. A lot of things that are very important in the pursuit of knowledge like logic, science or ethics are philosophical concepts and branches. It lays the foundation of what we call "objective".

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1998/09/bill-clinton-and...

If we are going to reduce philosophy to “subjective opinions”, then human knowledge actually includes “subjective opinions”. Being able to form and communicate clear, coherent, logical, consistent “subjective opinions” about the real world, including our internal states, is itself a form of knowledge. It is a skill that is arguably the root of civilization and absolutely the root of science.

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