Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#161

Post by tripzilch » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 3:38 PM UTC

seangransee wrote: post #5

pavel_lishin wrote: post #4

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? http://i.imgur.com/KSju9.png (Incidentally, my test case for the screenshot did not lead to Philosophy!)

totally agree. i hacked this together pretty quickly last night. definitely a lot of room for improvement. thanks for the feedback!

sorry to say, but couldn't you have thought about that before posting it on HN? you're on the front page, if your site really runs without caching, you must be wasting an enormous amount of WP's resources.

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#162

Post by RenierZA » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 4:04 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #114

pdx wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works because somebody is being funny, and created a self referential strange loop inside Wikipedia. That's a good find you found. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loops

Hofstadter was a genius, one of his books was called "I am a Strange Loop" and xkcd (jokingly) reported that his autobiography reads: I'm so meta even this acronym

Here it is: http://xkcd.com/917/

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#163

Post by seangransee » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 5:25 PM UTC

freejoe76 wrote: post #56

Strangely, http://wikiloopr.com/Tacos takes you to a different loop than http://wikiloopr.com/Burritos

clearly burritos are the more logical thing to eat

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#164

Post by zerop » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 7:26 PM UTC

All roads lead to Mathematics answers it -- http://www.xamuel.com/all-roads-lead-to-mathematics/

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#165

Post by seangransee » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 9:54 PM UTC

dkroy wrote: post #97

Are there any major articles that don't loop?

maybe not major, but the ones i've found so far that don't do it are

http://wikiloopr.com/home http://wikiloopr.com/chopsticks http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#166

Post by seangransee » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 9:56 PM UTC

seangransee wrote: post #165

dkroy wrote: post #97

Are there any major articles that don't loop?

maybe not major, but the ones i've found so far that don't do it are http://wikiloopr.com/home http://wikiloopr.com/chopsticks http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python

also, anything that leads to marriage http://wikiloopr.com/dating

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#167

Post by JacobIrwin » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 10:39 PM UTC

'television' was the first search term I could find that broke the loop - on the fifth or sixth attempt

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#168

Post by svdad » Sun, Sep 02, 2012, 6:43 AM UTC

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.

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#169

Post by groue » Sun, Sep 02, 2012, 9:31 AM UTC

fhars wrote: post #87

dude_abides wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah so thats why the degree is called Doctor of Philosophy?! Thanks for the enlightenment! I've wondered quite a lot of times why I'm a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science, and not Doctor of Computer Science.

Traditionally, a university had four faculties, the lower or artists faculty, and the three higher faculties of theology, law and medicine. Students would start in the artists faculty learning the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (including astrology)) to become a magister artium (M.A.) and then go to one of the higher faculties to get their doctorate (Th.D, LL.…

Very interesting, thanks. http://atilf.atilf.fr and Dictionnaire historique de la langue Française both see two meanings for the French "trivial": one is common as in commonplace, and the other is common as in gross and vulgar. The first comes from /trivialis/, as fhars says. The latter comes from /trivium/, the crossroads. I don't know if English also has the second meaning: vulgar.

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#170

Post by urza » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 8:14 AM UTC

Few days ago, when this was on MainPage, it ended in different loop than now.

Today most articles ends in cycle between Philosophy and Modern Philosophy.. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_philosophy )

few days ago, it was cycling between Philosophy and Agency ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy) )

What changed and why?