Oh, I think I found one that doesn't loop:
Port Arthur http://wikiloopr.com/Port%20Arthur
Either that, I found a bug.
Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
91–100 of 171 posts
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#92From a mathematical perspective, this is actually not that surprising. 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. 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 finit…
Unless the articles are edited before you come back!
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#93yesterday, 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.
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#94This is beautiful. I've always thought sites like IMDB and Wikipedia are hypertext expressions of the purest form. 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…
Ah yes. To me (to my productivity's detriment...) quite often when I visit Wikipedia it becomes a learning adventure. From one thing you can hop to the other, finding out all sorts of interesting and obscure things. To a curious mind like mine, Wikipedia is heaven!
Sometimes, I go onto wikipedia just to find out one fact... and end up with 6 or 7 tabs open on the topic, ranging from genetics to Judaism.
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#95I seem to have broken it here: http://wikiloopr.com/List%20of%20minor%20planets:%2075001%E2...
Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planets:_75001%E2...
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.
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#96Interesting find: "Sherlock Holmes" avoids the Argument/Philosophy loop; "Poirot" does not.
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#97Are there any major articles that don't loop?
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#98Here is a similar visualization of the phenomenon from last year http://xefer.com/wikipedia
This is a superior visualisation in my opinion - it actually builds you a tree of links as you enter subsequent searches. Quite interesting to see how article chains cluster into 3 or 4 different "main branches".
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#99This is the shortest one I've found so far - http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#100Works for:
* Carly Rae Jepson
* Paul is dead
* Telephony
* Easter Island
* Drum and bass
* Sunglasses
* CAT 5
* Willy Wonka
* Black hole
* Vancouver
* Cloud Cuckoo Land
* Bacon
* Radish
* Brunette
* Dunning-Kruger Effect
* Lady Gaga
* Sailor Moon
If the chain hits Philosophy first, it converges on Philosophy/Argument. If it hits Fact first, it converges on Fact/Truth.