From a mathematical perspective, this is actually not that surprising.<p>Think of the act of clicking the first link in the Wikipedia article as a function that takes in the page you're on and outputs another page.<p>If you call this function on itself over and over again (ie use the output of one step as in the input of the next step), you will eventually enter a loop. The proof of this is simple: there are only a finite number of Wikipedia articles, therefore you must eventually reach an article you've seen before. (This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be chaotic.)<p>Since it's necessarily true that all articles will eventually reach a loop when you iteratively click the first link, we have to ask: how unusual is it that they usually reach the SAME loop?
This may be hyper naive but is this the consequence of beginning most articles representing the current topic as a more specific form of another topic?<p>For example: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra</a><p>"Algebra ... is a branch of mathematics." (mathematics being a link)<p>So if you continue to generalize you'll end up at the most general subject which appears to be philosophy.<p>[update] added an example
This is beautiful. I've always thought sites like IMDB and Wikipedia are hypertext expressions of the purest form.<p>As a nerdy kid, over a few years I read my way through a significant chunk of the early 1990's Groliers Encyclopedia set my Grandma bought me at Krogers. And it was never cover-to-cover reading, instead it was filled with hopping around, page-to-page, volume-to-volume. Start at oscilloscope, but what's a cathode ray? And then it's in television? How does broadcasting work? I'd sit on the floor with a half dozen open encyclopedias open around me, the same way we can do now with browser tabs.<p>Wikipedia has many flaws, but it's a fantastic tool and I'd have killed for it as a 12 year old with 5 volumes of an encyclopedia in my backpack!
As far as I know, this was noticed in May last year on the xkcd forums. <a href="http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309" rel="nofollow">http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309</a> There's a writeup of it with a gigantic picture over here: <a href="http://www.mrphlip.com/wikiphilosophy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mrphlip.com/wikiphilosophy/</a>
I have a site: <a href="http://TheWikiGame.com" rel="nofollow">http://TheWikiGame.com</a> that makes a game out of a related idea (finding the connection between Wikipedia articles).<p>Recently, I've been giving access to the game data to people (like university researchers, etc) to test different theories on path connections made by real people, etc.<p>The game has now been running for over 3 years, has about 1.19 million players, playing over 1.37 million games, with about 1.22 million won games (successful start/end article connection).<p>Got a really cool application for all the game data? I'd love to hear: alex@thewikigame.com
Wikipedia is aware of this:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy</a>
Seems like it would be nice to cache some of these requests, instead of repeatedly hammering the Wikipedia API. And why is it grabbing images?<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/KSju9.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/KSju9.png</a><p>(Incidentally, my test case for the screenshot did not lead to Philosophy!)
Either philosophy is a dead end, then, or it is the base of all knowledge. Depends on whether knowledge is a tree or a graph, which is... a philosophical question!<p>My brain exploded.
I seem to have broken it here: <a href="http://wikiloopr.com/List%20of%20minor%20planets:%2075001%E2%80%9376000" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/List%20of%20minor%20planets:%2075001%E2...</a><p>Wikipedia page: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planets:_75001%E2%80%9376000" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planets:_75001%E2...</a><p>That is, however, a weird Wikipedia page. It seems like the first link is a target to another location on the page, which (I'd assume) would put it in an infinite loop.
It's funny, but it's true that everything in life ultimately leads back to philosophy.<p>As noted by XKCD, everything is based on something else: <a href="http://xkcd.com/435/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/435/</a><p>And I think after Maths on that should come Philosophy.
Guys :) This is always fun when it crops up - especially the musing on how deeply rooted the topic of philosophy is.<p>But <i>please</i> don't go editing articles to improve the loops or otherwise change them. Unless of course the change is beneficial to the article.<p>It's like going for a walk somewhere fascinating; enjoy the view, but leave nothing behind :)
What happens for Biology? <a href="http://wikiloopr.com/Biology" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/Biology</a>. For me, it goes down until it gets to Biology, and then highlights Biology over and over.<p><pre><code> Biology
Natural science
Science
Knowledge
Fact
Proof (truth)
Argument
Philosophy
Problem
Doubt
Belief
Proposition
Logic
Reason
Human
Mammal
Class (biology)
Biological classification
Organism
Biology
</code></pre>
The first link on the Wikipedia page for Biology is "Biology(disambiguation)", but the first textual link is "Natural Science". I assume it loops on Biology because it keeps going back between Biology (the article) and Biology (disambiguation), but that doesn't explain why the first redirect is to Natural Science in the very beginning.<p>Am I just missing something here?<p>Edit: This no longer happens. Now it properly loops on Philosophy and Proposition.
Works for:<p>* Carly Rae Jepson<p>* Paul is dead<p>* Telephony<p>* Easter Island<p>* Drum and bass<p>* Sunglasses<p>* CAT 5<p>* Willy Wonka<p>* Black hole<p>* Vancouver<p>* Cloud Cuckoo Land<p>* Bacon<p>* Radish<p>* Brunette<p>* Dunning-Kruger Effect<p>* Lady Gaga<p>* Sailor Moon<p>If the chain hits Philosophy first, it converges on Philosophy/Argument. If it hits Fact first, it converges on Fact/Truth.
I can't replicate it, but I encountered a weird bug. I entered "Star Trek" and hit Enter. The suggested items list appeared and I clicked on "Star Trek". Page titles appeared as normal, but everything appeared twice, like so:<p><pre><code> Star Trek
Star Trek
Cinema of the United States
Film
Cinema of the United States
Recording
Data
Level of measurement
Film
...etc until the last page title, "Reality"
</code></pre>
Seems like two processes were running in parallel and outputting to the same stream.
I love wiki. I spend hours following links. Having loops is a feature or else I might never stop.<p>Greek City States -><p><pre><code> Polis
City
Human settlement
Statistics
Data
Level of measurement
Stanley Smith Stevens
United States
Federalism
Politics
Art
Human behavior
Behavior
Organism
Biology
Natural science
Science
Knowledge
Fact
Proof (truth)
Argument
Philosophy
Problem
Doubt
Belief
Proposition loops to Philosophy</code></pre>
When images appear first in the page's source, the wrong link is chosen. I assume you are trying to go for the first link, as a human reader would see it.<p>For example, the page on Anime:<p><a href="http://wikiloopr.com/Anime" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/Anime</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anime&action=edit" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anime&action=e...</a>
<a href="http://wikiloopr.com/whale" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/whale</a><p>"Whale" leads to the "pinniped"/"marine mammal" loop. How about that one?
<i>In fact, according to a crawl of the Wikipedia database from May 2011, nearly 95% of Wikipedia articles will take you back to Philosophy.</i><p>- Always interested in the backstory of folks that sit around thinking this stuff up (and then testing it).<p><a href="http://www.syndiosocial.com/the-philosophy-of-networks/" rel="nofollow">http://www.syndiosocial.com/the-philosophy-of-networks/</a>
I think this is fairly trivially explained in most cases by the fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Almost by construction, nearly every article starts with "X is a Y" (modulo grammatical niceties) where Y is a more general class to which X belongs. In cases when the article doesn't follow that form, the first linked term is usually still explanatory or definitional in some sense and hence more general, and cases where that doesn't apply (e.g. Obstacle) are unusual enough that they don't generally break the cycles. There are no "Wikipedia axioms" that I know of, so this is pretty much guaranteed to end in a cycle looping through a limited set of terms used to talk about abstract concepts. Hence Philosophy.
One of these, at least, is supported by a pretty weird edit:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&diff=510188633&oldid=510134116" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&diff=51...</a>
Few days ago, when this was on MainPage, it ended in different loop than now.<p>Today most articles ends in cycle between Philosophy and Modern Philosophy.. ( <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_philosophy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_philosophy</a> )<p>few days ago, it was cycling between Philosophy and Agency ( <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)</a> )<p>What changed and why?
You have a bug. Pages like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc</a>. (note the dot at the end) have a "geographic coordinate system" link at the top, that isn't part of the article. So queries like <a href="http://wikiloopr.com/Steve%20Jobs" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/Steve%20Jobs</a> are actually returning wrong results.
Oh, I think I found one that doesn't loop:<p>Port Arthur
<a href="http://wikiloopr.com/Port%20Arthur" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/Port%20Arthur</a><p>Either that, I found a bug.
Does this hold true with following the xth link on the page? I'd predict it does, but the further x is from 1, the longer the average chain before you get to the loop (by virtue of definitions being at the top of wiki articles, then at some point the average length would hit a consistent level). Would love to see this modified to let you determine x.
After having twenty tries that got me into the philosophy loop, I started to think what are the most basic concepts that philosophy is "made of". Maybe I could escape the loop that way?<p>And lo and behold, I tried word "word" and it loops between "emotion" and "psychology". <a href="http://wikiloopr.com/word" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/word</a>
This reminds me of a game I used to play as an intern with other interns to kill time. Someone would pick a Wikipedia article deep down in the bowels of Wikipedia and we would race to the article from Wikipedia only using links. We could get the article surprisingly fast, most within only 5 intermediate page visits from the homepage.
This behaves erratically. Sometimes it considers the coordinates link, above the entire article the "first link" (in the "Michael Phelps" chain), sometimes not (Chicago). Consequentially, I believe "Michael Phelps", when the coordinate link is ignored, leads to it's own loop that is not the philosophy loop in question.
Nice demo, but I think it is an incorrect asumption that the first link is to a broader subject. For example, for Perú it says: "It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil" So Perú->Ecuador left me with a big wtf..<p><a href="http://wikiloopr.com/Peru" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/Peru</a>
about an hour after posting this, someone changed the philosophy page so the philosophy-reality loop doesn't happen.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy</a><p>it still brings you to a loop, but it's not an immediate back-and-forth between the last two.
Funny... As I was playing with this, somebody changed the order of:<p>"In philosophy and sociology..."<p>On the Agency (philosophy) page. This changed the output of the results, but in the end the loop still existed. However, I couldn't help but feel like someone is trying to hack the matrix.
Someone just changed the Reason page [1] which is now putting the focus on Biology instead of Philosophy.<p>1: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&oldid=510134116" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&oldid=5...</a>
Puts me in mind of Translation Party[1] (which is back up, kudos to WillC and Rick!). There's a lot to be entertained via this sort of vertex-following algorithm.<p>[1] <a href="http://translationparty.com/" rel="nofollow">http://translationparty.com/</a>
Here's one that - if executed on the Federation computer on board the Starship Enterprise - would make smoke and sparks fly from the terminal...<p><a href="http://wikiloopr.com/Reince%20Priebus" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/Reince%20Priebus</a>
I played with this [1] when I first started programming in Ruby. The results were super interesting (but now I regret not using the Wikipedia API...)<p>[1] <a href="https://gist.github.com/1654064" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/1654064</a>
Strangely, <a href="http://wikiloopr.com/Tacos" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/Tacos</a> takes you to a different loop than <a href="http://wikiloopr.com/Burritos" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/Burritos</a>
Interestingly, Paul Graham [1] leads to the photographer, but still leads back to the Web before heading to philosophy/proposition.<p>[1] <a href="http://wikiloopr.com/Paul%20Graham" rel="nofollow">http://wikiloopr.com/Paul%20Graham</a>
I remember someone on reddit posting a python script that does the same thing (following the wiki chain to Philosophy).<p>Amusingly, my test got stuck in a loop between Science and Natural Science. :)
All roads lead to Mathematics answers it -- <a href="http://www.xamuel.com/all-roads-lead-to-mathematics/" rel="nofollow">http://www.xamuel.com/all-roads-lead-to-mathematics/</a>
You could optimize this a bit by caching the loops, I noticed some pauses between Fact and Truth, seeing as how that loop always comes up it would be nice to cache it.
yesterday, the loop was always the same. since this made it to the top of hacker news, the loop has been changing. look at the revision history of some of those pages and you'll see that people on wikipedia are messing with the loop.
i started with "The Tyger" and got this:<p><pre><code> The Tyger
William Blake
Romanticism
Industrial Revolution
United Kingdom
Britain (placename)
Great Britain
</code></pre>
<i>shrug</i> apparently, william blake is indisputable.<p>m3mnoch.