5 ms·

Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

289 points by tbull007 15y ago

duien 15y ago
By the time I looked at this, the end path had changed, as "Fact" now leads to "Truth" instead of "Information". How long until someone intentionally manipulates the chain?
- mat_kelcey 15y ago
  I was using the 2011-07-22 set so the data's already a bit stale...
  - Steko 15y ago
    My first theory was to edit a few articles including one point of the post-Science chain before Philosophy so that it got into a loop and it looked like all of Wikipedia led to Trilateral Commission.
  - starwed 15y ago
    When I first read the xkcd comic, I was amused that the article on philosophy didn't lead to itself. (It got trapped in a 2-cycle.) Then I noticed that this was only because of an edit someone had made earlier in the day...
p9idf 15y ago
the author doesn't capitalize his sentences. i didn't find it difficult to read and only noticed halfway through the article. supposedly, capitalized sentences are easier to read, so i wonder if i've been conditioned by the internet to find uncapitalized sentences easy to read as well. off-topic, but interesting.
- mat_kelcey 15y ago
  oh your irony...
gsivil 15y ago
I was about to to link to previous discussions of the same claim/question http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592522 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592522 But then I read the article... Very nice!
deleted 15y ago
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RobertHubert 15y ago
Just tested it for the hell of it, started with "FireFighter", thought it was random... and 30 clicks later landed on Philosophy! Fun stuff.
- RobertHubert 15y ago
  Tried the word Stupid... Just got stuck in a loop. EDIT: Tried it again... Stupid - Philosophy = 11
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 15y ago
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  - RobertHubert 15y ago
    - I deleted that part of my comment to avoid a stoning lol... But yeah I was thinking something like an excel read out of the words, and just a fun little engine that would let you test any word on the fly. Maybe even live stat tracking for popular words that updates daily, I just love the idea of these word relationships. But there is soo much room for deliberate tampering.
- Rusky 15y ago
  Someone did that a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587352 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587352 Seems the actual script is gone but there may be a new version in the comments.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
JoshTriplett 15y ago
Someone previously created a "steps to philosophy" site (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587352 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587352), but it seems to have vanished.
stmartin 15y ago
At the risk of being downvoted, ultimately all links on Wikipedia lead to God.
westicle 15y ago
Project HN: Identify all non-confirming Wikipedia articles and edit them to fit the pattern.
maeon3 15y ago
Community -> Living -> Life -> Physical body -> Physics -> Natural science -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Sequence -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property (philosophy) -> Modern philosophy -> Philosophy It's kind of like zooming in on what it means means to be alive in this universe. 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.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  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.
  - maeon3 15y ago
    If you make a claim, then answer it, and ask "Why" and keep doing that, then you will eventually get down to the response: "Because I said so" or "because that is how we observe it to be". "The words and values we use to describe nature are all imprecise approximations, many are wildly wrong. We observe phenomena all around us, and if you try to describe what it is, and ask "why" enough times then you get down to the discussion of what frame of reference we use to observe the universe. We have a body of knowledge, and we tack on new observations onto that body, occasionally the body reforms and the philosophy changes. Every learner has a philosophy. Philosophy is where the rubber meets the road in figuring out what our universe is. Is matter a particle or a wave or other, it depends on your existing perspective, your philosophy.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      I think of philosophy as the point where people throw their hands into the air in despair and say "Fuck it, I can't break this down any further, figure it out yourself", at which point the famous philosophers have joyfully begun down that ill defined path without an end. When Plato gave Socrates' definition of man as "featherless bipeds" and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man." I think Diogenes really may have actually "got it".
dwyer 15y ago
Bob Dylan -> 1960s in music -> Popular music -> Music genre -> Genre -> Literature -> Art -> Senses -> Physiology -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Truth -> Reality -> Philosophy
preamble 15y ago
Already been done 5 months ago at http://www.xefer.com/ http://www.xefer.com/
whacker 15y ago
A lot of them do, but sometimes there are loops (Eg. Computer Science). If you make an exception, choosing the second link for example, then it will lead you to philosophy.
- atomicdog 15y ago
  If you make exceptions indiscriminately it will lead you to anything.
bluekeybox 15y ago
Why philosophy? If you keep clicking, you actually end up in a loop: Philosophy -> Reason -> Human nature -> Thought -> Consciousness -> Mind -> Panpsychism -> 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).
- deleted 15y ago
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- dimmuborgir 15y ago
  Saying "you cannot have philosophy without a mind" itself is one of the many philosophical concepts of mind-matter dualism.
  - bluekeybox 15y ago
    And saying what you just said is using reason.
    - dimmuborgir 15y ago
      Reason or intuition! That's another 'philosophical' problem!
RobertHubert 15y ago
Seeing as we humans ceated Wikipedia perhaps in an effort to define and describe everything there is, the product ends up filtered through the lenses of it's creators and in doing so we inevitably end up defining what it is to be human. I dont believe we can understand or describe anything beyond what it is we are. Wikipedia is essentially the accumulation of the collective knowledge of it's creators so what else should we expect it to be outside of the definition of what it is to be man. The attempt to collect and master the understanding of everything is afterall a philosophic endeavor. Done babbling now lol.
deleted 15y ago
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blago 15y ago
You can try it for yourself: http://blago.dachev.com/wikidrill http://blago.dachev.com/wikidrill
- tbull007 15y ago
  That's great! Does it "crawl" wikipedia live?
- atomicdog 15y ago
  The default first entry, "Human", doesn't even reach "philosophy" before the maximum of 50 steps is reached. Kinda blows a hole in the theory...
  - glassx 15y ago
    It does: Human -> Living -> Biology -> Natural Science -> Branch -> Knowledge -> Facts -> Truth -> Reality -> Philosophy
Qa8BBatwHxK8Pu 15y ago
not Rome, huh
yxhuvud 15y ago
But which of the twelve has the lowest average length? The article points to 'science', but how would the number of steps graph look then?
clemesha 15y ago
Related: http://TheWikiGame.com http://TheWikiGame.com (multiplayer game of connecting Wikipedia articles with different constraints)
RobertHubert 15y ago
Start: Wikipedia -> free -> artwork -> Aesthetics -> Philosophy. 4 clicks away.
fezzl 15y ago
It even worked when I tried "Stone Cold Steve Austin"...
clownzor 15y ago
I found a few that didn't go to philosophy back when the comic came out. My favorite: Han Solo -> Harrison Ford -> Han Solo...
cormullion 15y ago
Then, can you get from Philosophy to Mornington Crescent? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikington_Crescent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikington_Crescent
RobertHubert 15y ago
What about other sites like www.conservapedia.com or www.rationalwiki.org? I tried on conservapedia and kept winding up at Earth or stuck in a loop.
- atomicdog 15y ago
  On Conversvapedia everything eventually leads to "Ronald Reagan".
atomicdog 15y ago
Nope. You can get stuck in loops pretty easily.
stonemetal 15y ago
When the question came up on XKCD a little while ago the answer is "no there are several loops that don't loop through philosophy". On a more conceptual level what does it mean to lead to philosophy? First links on Wikipedia do not form a tree with philosophy as the root, after all philosophy has a first link that is not itself. So we are looking at a graph and attempting to determine if all random walks of the graph passes through point P.

289 points by tbull007 15y ago

duien 15y ago

By the time I looked at this, the end path had changed, as "Fact" now leads to "Truth" instead of "Information". How long until someone intentionally manipulates the chain?

mat_kelcey 15y ago
I was using the 2011-07-22 set so the data's already a bit stale...
- Steko 15y ago
  My first theory was to edit a few articles including one point of the post-Science chain before Philosophy so that it got into a loop and it looked like all of Wikipedia led to Trilateral Commission.
- starwed 15y ago
  When I first read the xkcd comic, I was amused that the article on philosophy didn't lead to itself. (It got trapped in a 2-cycle.) Then I noticed that this was only because of an edit someone had made earlier in the day...

p9idf 15y ago

the author doesn't capitalize his sentences. i didn't find it difficult to read and only noticed halfway through the article. supposedly, capitalized sentences are easier to read, so i wonder if i've been conditioned by the internet to find uncapitalized sentences easy to read as well. off-topic, but interesting.

mat_kelcey 15y ago
oh your irony...

gsivil 15y ago

I was about to to link to previous discussions of the same claim/question http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592522 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592522 But then I read the article... Very nice!

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

RobertHubert 15y ago

Just tested it for the hell of it, started with "FireFighter", thought it was random... and 30 clicks later landed on Philosophy! Fun stuff.

RobertHubert 15y ago
Tried the word Stupid... Just got stuck in a loop. EDIT: Tried it again... Stupid - Philosophy = 11
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- RobertHubert 15y ago
  - I deleted that part of my comment to avoid a stoning lol... But yeah I was thinking something like an excel read out of the words, and just a fun little engine that would let you test any word on the fly. Maybe even live stat tracking for popular words that updates daily, I just love the idea of these word relationships. But there is soo much room for deliberate tampering.
Rusky 15y ago
Someone did that a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587352 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587352 Seems the actual script is gone but there may be a new version in the comments.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

JoshTriplett 15y ago

Someone previously created a "steps to philosophy" site (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587352 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587352), but it seems to have vanished.

stmartin 15y ago

At the risk of being downvoted, ultimately all links on Wikipedia lead to God.

westicle 15y ago

Project HN: Identify all non-confirming Wikipedia articles and edit them to fit the pattern.

maeon3 15y ago

Community -> Living -> Life -> Physical body -> Physics -> Natural science -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Sequence -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property (philosophy) -> Modern philosophy -> Philosophy It's kind of like zooming in on what it means means to be alive in this universe. 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.

burgerbrain 15y ago
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.
- maeon3 15y ago
  If you make a claim, then answer it, and ask "Why" and keep doing that, then you will eventually get down to the response: "Because I said so" or "because that is how we observe it to be". "The words and values we use to describe nature are all imprecise approximations, many are wildly wrong. We observe phenomena all around us, and if you try to describe what it is, and ask "why" enough times then you get down to the discussion of what frame of reference we use to observe the universe. We have a body of knowledge, and we tack on new observations onto that body, occasionally the body reforms and the philosophy changes. Every learner has a philosophy. Philosophy is where the rubber meets the road in figuring out what our universe is. Is matter a particle or a wave or other, it depends on your existing perspective, your philosophy.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    I think of philosophy as the point where people throw their hands into the air in despair and say "Fuck it, I can't break this down any further, figure it out yourself", at which point the famous philosophers have joyfully begun down that ill defined path without an end. When Plato gave Socrates' definition of man as "featherless bipeds" and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man." I think Diogenes really may have actually "got it".

dwyer 15y ago

Bob Dylan -> 1960s in music -> Popular music -> Music genre -> Genre -> Literature -> Art -> Senses -> Physiology -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Truth -> Reality -> Philosophy

preamble 15y ago

Already been done 5 months ago at http://www.xefer.com/ http://www.xefer.com/

whacker 15y ago

A lot of them do, but sometimes there are loops (Eg. Computer Science). If you make an exception, choosing the second link for example, then it will lead you to philosophy.

atomicdog 15y ago
If you make exceptions indiscriminately it will lead you to anything.

bluekeybox 15y ago

Why philosophy? If you keep clicking, you actually end up in a loop: Philosophy -> Reason -> Human nature -> Thought -> Consciousness -> Mind -> Panpsychism -> 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).

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
dimmuborgir 15y ago
Saying "you cannot have philosophy without a mind" itself is one of the many philosophical concepts of mind-matter dualism.
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  And saying what you just said is using reason.
  - dimmuborgir 15y ago
    Reason or intuition! That's another 'philosophical' problem!

RobertHubert 15y ago

Seeing as we humans ceated Wikipedia perhaps in an effort to define and describe everything there is, the product ends up filtered through the lenses of it's creators and in doing so we inevitably end up defining what it is to be human. I dont believe we can understand or describe anything beyond what it is we are. Wikipedia is essentially the accumulation of the collective knowledge of it's creators so what else should we expect it to be outside of the definition of what it is to be man. The attempt to collect and master the understanding of everything is afterall a philosophic endeavor. Done babbling now lol.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

blago 15y ago

You can try it for yourself: http://blago.dachev.com/wikidrill http://blago.dachev.com/wikidrill

tbull007 15y ago
That's great! Does it "crawl" wikipedia live?
atomicdog 15y ago
The default first entry, "Human", doesn't even reach "philosophy" before the maximum of 50 steps is reached. Kinda blows a hole in the theory...
- glassx 15y ago
  It does: Human -> Living -> Biology -> Natural Science -> Branch -> Knowledge -> Facts -> Truth -> Reality -> Philosophy

Qa8BBatwHxK8Pu 15y ago

not Rome, huh

yxhuvud 15y ago

But which of the twelve has the lowest average length? The article points to 'science', but how would the number of steps graph look then?

clemesha 15y ago

Related: http://TheWikiGame.com http://TheWikiGame.com (multiplayer game of connecting Wikipedia articles with different constraints)

RobertHubert 15y ago

Start: Wikipedia -> free -> artwork -> Aesthetics -> Philosophy. 4 clicks away.

fezzl 15y ago

It even worked when I tried "Stone Cold Steve Austin"...

clownzor 15y ago

I found a few that didn't go to philosophy back when the comic came out. My favorite: Han Solo -> Harrison Ford -> Han Solo...

cormullion 15y ago

Then, can you get from Philosophy to Mornington Crescent? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikington_Crescent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikington_Crescent

RobertHubert 15y ago

What about other sites like www.conservapedia.com or www.rationalwiki.org? I tried on conservapedia and kept winding up at Earth or stuck in a loop.

atomicdog 15y ago
On Conversvapedia everything eventually leads to "Ronald Reagan".

atomicdog 15y ago

Nope. You can get stuck in loops pretty easily.

stonemetal 15y ago

When the question came up on XKCD a little while ago the answer is "no there are several loops that don't loop through philosophy". On a more conceptual level what does it mean to lead to philosophy? First links on Wikipedia do not form a tree with philosophy as the root, after all philosophy has a first link that is not itself. So we are looking at a graph and attempting to determine if all random walks of the graph passes through point P.