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Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

matpalm.com

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Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

#12

Post by Rusky »

RobertHubert wrote: post #8

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

Someone did that a while ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587352

Seems the actual script is gone but there may be a new version in the comments.

Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

#15

Post by Steko »

mat_kelcey wrote: post #4
duien wrote: post #2

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?

I was using the 2011-07-22 set so the data's already a bit stale...

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.

Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

#16

Post by RobertHubert »

[deleted] wrote: post #10
RobertHubert wrote: post #8

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

[deleted]

- 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.

Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

#19

Post by maeon3 »

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.

Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

#20

Post by burgerbrain »

maeon3 wrote: post #19

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. I…

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.
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