All Roads Lead to Philosophy
A few weeks ago, we learned about how the Internet was made up of a set of directed connections–links pointing from one web-page to another. This information that is stored within the internet is organized with these directed connections, and can be viewed as a directed graph.
Wikipedia is a very useful resource made up of many of these directed connections, storing information in this way. People have taken advantage of this fact, creating various “games” involving Wikipedia and navigating to a specific pre-determined page from other pages simply by clicking on these links. However, there is one special case for this, in which the majority of the time (around 93% of all Wikipedia Pages) link back to “Philosophy.” The guidelines for this phenomenon are the following:
1. You have to click on the first non-parenthesized, non-italicized link.
2. You ignore external links, links to the current page, or red links.
3. You stop either once you’ve reached “Philosophy,” a page with no links on it, a page that doesn’t exist, or when you get stuck in a loop.
The resources that I’ve added at the bottom show various pictures and networks actually displaying this, giving a better visual of what is going on. One very interesting feature is that for the last few articles before Philosophy, the articles don’t form much of a branched network at all. Instead, they usually form more of a chain, going from one article to the next. In this way, “Philosophy” acts as a type of sink, where regardless of what you start with, you will almost always end up there.
One interesting reason behind this occurrence has something to do with how Wikipedia is structured. An article usually starts with a general summary of the article, putting it into context for the reader. When clicking on the first (non-italicized, non-parenthesized) link, you then are brought to a slightly more general Wikipedia Page. This continues on until more and more general subjects are reached, which then all will point towards the widest category–Philosophy.
The Internet as well as Wikipedia is made up of a Bow-Tie structure, when viewing them as a network made of directed connections. This involves a strongly connected component, as well as many pages that also link in or out of this component, but are not actually part of it. However, if one follow the rules for this phenomenon, one can see that this specific Wikipedia network is more tree-like, with Philosophy at its roots.
Here are two links about the phenomenon, explaining it, and providing some more information.
http://matpalm.com/blog/2011/08/13/wikipedia-philosophy/
Here’s a useful image demonstrating and helping visualize this phenomenon.
http://xefer.com/2011/05/wikipedia
In fact, there’s even a Wikipedia page about it, explaining how the “game” works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy