Page Rank for Wikipedia’s “Philosophy” Page
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/14/wikipedia-philosophy_n_1093460.html
“All Wikipedia Ends In Philosophy, Literally,” by Amy Lee, is a brief article that examines the phenomenon of how clicking the first (non-italicized) term of nearly any Wikipedia entry eventually leads the user to the “Philosophy” page. First discovered in 2008, the phenomenon details that the chain could only be completed if the following terms and directions are followed:
- Clicking on the first non-parenthesized, non-italicized link
- Ignoring external links, links to the current page, or red links
- Stopping when reaching “Philosophy,” a page with no links is reached, or a page that does not exist, or a loop occurs.
Wikipedia claims that this phenomenon applies to 94.5% of Wikipedia pages, lending credence to the belief that philosophy and, therefore to a lesser extent, knowledge are the root of all things.
When reading this article, I found that I kept thinking about what the page rank of the Wikipedia Philosophy page relative to both other Wikipedia pages and all other webpages in general. Considering that 94.5% Wikipedia pages could eventually reach the Philosophy page but these pages cannot be accessed when starting at the Philosophy page, I believe that there cannot be a true set of equilibrium page rank values. As each step of the basic page update rule is run, less and less information will be returned to the top. Clearly a limiting scale would have to be used. Overall, I would say that examining this article in terms of concept we learned in class was very interesting.