All Wikipedia Roads Were Forced to Philosophy

Does everything boil down to philosophy? A case could be made that it’s really all about math and science. Or perhaps breasts. In the alt-text of Wednesday’s XKCD comic, a specific challenge was made: “Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at ‘Philosophy’.”

Game on. I already had a tab open to the Wikipedia page for “Where Mathematics Comes From” and decided to see how long it took:

Where Mathematics Comes From

1. George Lakoff
2. Cognitive linguistics
3. Linguistics
4. Human
5. Taxonomy
6. Science
7. Knowledge
8. Fact
9. Information
10. Sequence
11. Mathematics
12. Quantity
13. Property (Philosophy)
14. Modern Philosophy
15. Philosophy

Ok, maybe that one was too easy. Let’s use my go-to example: Waffles:

Waffle

1. Batter (cooking)
2. Flour
3. Powder
4. Solid
5. State of matter
6. Phase (matter)
7. Outline of physical science
8. Natural science
9. Science
10. Knowledge
11. Fact
12. Information
13. Sequence
14. Mathematics
15. Quantity
16. Property (Philosophy)
17. Modern Philosophy
18. Philosophy

Well son of a gun. I’ve tried it with ‘Mongoose’ (11 clicks), Baltimore Ravens football player ‘Ed Reed’ (16 clicks), and ‘Lord of the Rings’ (22 clicks). All led back to Philosophy.

Well, we don’t END at philosophy – we could keep going. It turns out that (as of writing this) there’s a 19-step loop including philosophy, science, mathematics, and mammory gland.

We could just as easily say that all paths lead to science! Or math! Or breasts!

However, before you get too excited, it turns out there’s some mischief afoot.

First, it’s been two days since the XKCD comic went up, and considering how malleable Wikipedia is, some things have been changed. I was suspicious that Quantity’s first link went to Property (Philosophy) so I checked the history page:

# (cur | prev) 09:54, 25 May 2011 99.186.253.32 (talk) (14,042 bytes) (Edited for xkcd)

# (cur | prev) 09:28, 25 May 2011 146.162.240.242 (talk) (14,004 bytes) (Undid revision 430815864 by Antony-22 (talk) see today’s xkcd, without the “property” link, it breaks the “all pages eventually end up at philosophy ” game. The link should be there)

I actually found a small loop that Male leads to Gender, which leads back to Male. I expect the Male one will be “fixed” at some point (a phrase you don’t hear outside the veterinarian very often).

The philosophy topic has been in the XKCD forums last Sunday, and the idea was around for longer than that. Tricky editing has been going on toward this goal for a while.

I’d heard that philosophy leads to reason, which leads to rationality, which leads back to philosophy. That’s been changed since Wednesday, and I wonder if a deliberate effort moved the path from rationality to breasts.

Yes, it’s true that the first link on an article is likely to be broad and trend toward science/philosophy, but this isn’t unguided evolution. This is intelligently designed.