All Roads Point to Philosophy
There is a really interesting phenomenon which applies to 95% of Wikipedia pages where if you click recursively click on the first non-parenthesized and non-italicized link on a page (ignoring broken links, links to the same page, or external links) you will always end on on the article about Philosophy. If you apply this to the Philosophy page itself, it will loop back onto itself.
Above is an digraph I made to illustrate this concept starting at Neanderthal. As you can see, the graph traverses subjects less and less specific to the original topic until reaching Philosophy and looping forever. I won’t get into why this happens, because I’m sure it can be explained by things being explained by the sciences which all boil down to philosophy somehow, but I want to discuss a few interesting features of this phenomenon.
What’s the Authority Score of Philosophy?
I was wondering this, as I’m sure you are too. Consider that 95% of wikipedia articles point eventually to philosophy in multiple steps, and this calculation gets complex fast. So I took 5 nodes out of the above graph and did some calculations:
(Note that (x, y) represents (authority score, hub score) and that I alternated steps between Authority Update and Hub Update)
As you can see with this small set of nodes, the authority score of philosophy doubles with each Authority Update. And thus moves from about 50% of authority of once normalized at step 3 to around 72% at step 5. If I continued iterating over these rules, I believe that Philosophy would eventually converge an authority score of almost 100% and any nodes that directly point to philosophy will almost share entirely 100% of the normalized hub score. What does this mean? I like to think it means that Philosophy is the leading authority on 95% of human knowledge; meaning if you want to know more about any topic you should start with an understanding of Philosophy since it is the greatest authority of 95% of topics.
As I conclude my post, I’d like to also point out that philosophy could be related to a gatekeeper node in that all nodes in this graph do have to pass through philosophy, following their path, at some point during its traversal.
Here’s a website where you can type in a topic and it will show you the path to Philosophy: http://www.wikiloopr.com
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/14/wikipedia-philosophy_n_1093460.html