Clicking the first link on Wikipedia Pages Leads to “Philosophy”
I have always heard that if you click on the first link on a Wikipedia page and then keep clicking the first links on successive pages, then you will almost always end up on the page “philosophy.” When we first began learning about page rank, I always assumed that the philosophy page would have a higher authority score than other pages on Wikipedia. An authority score denotes how many pages link to a specific page, and how good that page is as an authority on a certain subject. Because a lot of Wikipedia pages seemingly link to “philosophy,” I assumed that the “philosophy” page should have a high authority score. After looking around online, however, I realized this was not the case.
It is not that most pages are pointing to that one specific page, giving it a high page rank for most subjects, but instead successive chains of pages are leading to philosophy. This tree diagram that I found online creates the node/edge network view of some Wikipedia pages that we have seen many times in class. By looking at this one can see that with many pages will always link to “Mathematics” and 4 extra clicks will always get to “Philosophy.” Thus, “Philosophy” wouldn’t have a high first-link authority score, but “Mathematics” would. This would give “Mathematics” a high authority score.
When looking at the point of Wikipedia which acts as an online encyclopedia, this makes sense. The fact that a lot of pages first links go to “Mathematics” shows how many different subject matters can be boiled down to Math. Other popular pages with many links to them include “Science” and “Information.” Thinking about the pages as roads it looks like all of the roads lead to a highway of the basic sciences. Thinking about them the opposite way, it seems like Philosophy branches out into all of the other pages on Wikipedia.
The first-link page ranks on Wikipedia show interesting things about authority score and page rank, but can also be boiled down to something interesting about how the information of the world is categorized.
SOURCES:
https://xefer.com/2011/05/wikipedia