9 ms·
Getting to “Philosophy”
- dreamfactory2 11y agoDoes this only apply to philosophy or do x degrees of separation allow you to substitute any other topic?
- shawndumas 11y agoIt's funny you should ask because last night my son and I were looking at the periodic table of elements. He said "boy, I bet you just by clicking on links we could get to pumpkin"; and we did. Not quite the same but fun nonetheless.
- drewrv 11y agoSounds like he might like this: http://thewikigame.com/6-degrees-of-wikipedia http://thewikigame.com/6-degrees-of-wikipedia
- thaumasiotes 11y agoI've tried it, but it doesn't seem to register me. I'll join a game, it will keep a count of my clicks, I'll find the goal, and then it will say "no win". Then the game will time out and I'll see "no winners in the last game". What's going on here? Edit: Ah, apparently to win you have to get it in exactly 6 clicks.
- tyre 11y agoIt does not apply to just anything, since links are one-directional. This applies to philosophy because articles tend to mention the general categories they fall under. The classification of knowledge generally falls under the purview of philosophy, so naturally following links upwards will lead to it eventually.
- tyre 11y agoIt does not apply to just anything, since links are one-directional. This applies to philosophy because articles tend to mention the general categories they fall under. The classification of knowledge generally falls under the purview of philosophy, so naturally following links upwards will lead to it eventually.
- alextgordon 11y agoIf you keep going you end up in a cycle: Philosophy -> Reality -> Existence -> Ontology -> Philosophy
- jjoonathan 11y agoYeah, of course you can substitute anything :) 7 or 8 years ago in high school we had a "degrees of separation to Hitler" wikipedia game. Perhaps philosophy lets you add additional constraints (e.g. click the first link of a certain form) or obtain slightly lower numbers? Historical figures have the advantage that you don't have to navigate up through layers of classification, you just have to get to a date link (there were better tricks -- date links were the "last resort").
- mikeash 11y agoIt's not simply that you can find Philosophy from any page. It's that if you blindly click the first link on the page repeatedly, you nearly always reach Philoshophy at some point.
- butterfinger 11y agoThis applies only to philosophy because it is about always using the first link in the article.
- xefer 11y agoI wrote this several years ago if anyone is interested: http://xefer.com/wikipedia http://xefer.com/wikipedia It's not perfect but I enjoyed working on it
- flippant 11y agoYour project looks really cool, but it would be great if one could share a link to a query.
- xefer 11y agoThanks. I will put that together. Really I should have done that from the start.
- mdcox 11y agoThis is alot of fun. Would it be really difficult to be able to "blacklist" pages from the UI? I keep trying to come up with really disparate topics to find interesting connections, but everything is linked by "Knowledge".
- igravious 11y agoThink this must be the first time I've gone out of my way to log in to post a reply. Bloody brilliant. Care to explain how it works? That is all. Tip of the cap to you sir.
- xefer 11y agoThanks. This is all client-side code, which was my entire goal. The visualization itself is built with the InfoVis toolkit (which I'm not sure is being maintained any longer.) If I were to do this today I'd look at D3 probably. The Wikipedia API is nice. It just requests an article by name and parses the result trying to get the first link. Getting that link can be a bit tricky though since there can be all sorts of metadata that needs to b ignored. Luckily Wikipedia seems to stick with some standard patterns. So basically it just recursively follows links until it either hit Philosophy or one that it has encountered before, in which case a branch is made.
- pierrec 11y agoA good friend of mine is a student of philosophy, and I often argue with him about the importance and usefulness of the discipline. His favorite metaphor on the matter goes like this: If each domain of science was a finger, philosophy would be the thumb. It's the one that the others should rest upon when being used. Of course, I always dismiss his metaphor as pie-in-the-sky ridiculous. But I must concede that this phenomenon occurring on Wikipedia gives a lot of weight to his argument.
- mannykannot 11y agoAsk him for contemporary examples of philosophy's usefulness to science. While on the subject, you might want to argue that philosophy has become too self-referential to be relevant. I don't think the Wikipedia phenomenon means a whole lot. Here's an alternative metaphor: philosophy is the pot we put all the loose ends in, until some advance in science allows us to work on them some more. That doesn't mean philosophy is making progress on them.
- shabda 11y agoHere is a contemporary example: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542626/why-self-driving-cars-must-be-programmed-to-kill/ http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542626/why-self-driving...
- mannykannot 11y agoPhilosophy is something of a grab-bag of disparate disciplines, and I agree that ethics can often (and should) inform public policy.
- foldr 11y ago> Philosophy is something of a grab bag of disparate disciplines So is science. Please don't tell me we're going to play that tedious game where we give you lots of examples of philosophy's relevance and your response is just "oh but I didn't mean that kind of philosophy".
- jokoon 11y agoI wish wikipedia was indexed by subject, so that you could download smaller parts of it for online use.
- morninj 11y agoMaybe Wikipedia's "Portals" are what you want? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Portals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Portals
- Tideflat 11y agoOr Wikipedia books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Books (This is not Wikibooks.)
- igravious 11y agoHmm. For a machine-centric view there's the intriguing DBPedia[0]. One of the 'chunking' methods that Wikipedia uses is categories (you undoubtedly knew that) and here is the page that deals with that[1]. Indeed, there's entire category on Wikipedia Categorization[2]. There's the Category Tree page, dead useful, here's one for `semiotics' by way of example[3] I'd be tickled pink if others could drop more pointers here! Without doubt, as Wikipedia continues to self-organize it is going reveal structural truths about the knowledge humanity is creating. --- [0] http://wiki.dbpedia.org/ http://wiki.dbpedia.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_categorization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_categorizat... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategoryTree&target=semiotics&mode=categories&namespaces= https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategor...
- emw 11y agoThe Wikidata taxonomy is basically the successor to Wikipedia's category tree. It not only irons out language-based differences (e.g. the category tree being different among Chinese, Spanish, English, etc. Wikipedias), but also captures the idea of generalization through a more semantically meaningful relation. This Wikidata concept tree is constructed with "subclass of" (P279) [1], a property that expresses the proposition "all instances of these items are also instances of those items". The goal is to have a subsumption hierarchy that classifies all human knowledge. There's an RDF/OWL export of the Wikidata taxonomy available at [2] as wikidata-taxonomy.nt.gz, which can be explored with Semantic Web browsers like Protege [3]. Another fundamental relation -- "part of" (P361) [4] -- expresses mereological relationships. For (oversimplified) example: "iris part of eye", "eye part of head", "head part of body", etc. Both "subclass of" and "part of" are transitive. A separate comment of mine in this discussion [5] describes how to traverse the "subclass of" tree in the Wikidata UI and a third-party tool called Wikidata Generic Tree. The same principle applies to the "part of" tree. The latter gets less attention, but is also quite interesting. --- 1. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P279 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P279 2. http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-exports/rdf/index.php?content=dump_download.php&dump=20151012 http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-exports/rdf/index.php?cont... 3. http://protege.stanford.edu/ http://protege.stanford.edu/ 4. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P361 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P361 5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448573
- amelius 11y agoThis seems like a very "fragile" fact. Anyone aware of this could easily break it.
- drdeca 11y agoPeople have tried.
- tgb 11y agoOn the contrary, it's a tautology. There are only a finite number of articles, so either your chain reaches philosophy, it ends because there are no links/broken links, or it gets stuck in a loop. The other possibility is that it never ends but never reaches philosophy, but that means it must loop since there are only finite number of articles. The interesting thing is two fold: most articles end up in the philosophy case, and the loops that do exist tend to be small.
- c3534l 11y agoHuh. I woulda thought wikipedia links would lead you to "Hitler" more often than not.
- too_late 11y agoBut why? Is it because philosophy is an abstract science? On a side note: me and a buddy I used to work with used to play a game where we would start on a certain wiki page and try to get to another page just by clicking links in the page, and do it in the fewest 'hops' as possible. You can get to most pages from most pages in a dozen hops or so, if you know which ones to click.
- emw 11y agoIt's also fun doing this on Wikidata with "subclass of". * Go to a Wikidata item, e.g. "sailboat" [1] * Click on the "subclass of" (P279) value or, if no such value exists, the "instance of" (P31) value * Follow the "subclass of" chain up to "entity" [2] You can do the reverse -- i.e. go down the classification tree -- with tools like Wikidata Generic Tree [3]. --- 1. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1075310 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1075310 2. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q35120 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q35120 3. http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/tree.html?q=Q35120&rp=279&depth=2&lang=en http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/tree.html?q=Q35120&rp...
- barbs 11y agoIt reminds me of how, if you ask why something is so, and then keep asking "why?" to every answer you get, you tend to end up asking philosophical questions.
- joe5150 11y agoChoosing the first link is more or less arbitrary for the purposes of this test. Knowing as we do that nearly all articles lead to Philosophy, I'd be interested in knowing the minimum and maximum distances to Philosophy via traversal of all links in an article. I feel like this may tell us something interesting about the relative "distance" from philosophy a given subject has, but it's also just as likely to not tell us anything.
- FuuBar 11y agoIt would be interesting to repeat the analysis for other languages. Do other languages have other attractors? Trying it for Spanish, I seem to get stuck in short loop more often, or in Psicología. I got to Filosofía once, but even that takes me to Psicología. Psicología links you back to itself: Psicología -> Profesión -> Especialización -> Actividad -> Psicología loop.