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Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parenthesis or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy". - Randall Munroe, XKCD 903: Extended Mind (mouse-over text)

I have tried this for several different articles and was surprised to find that it worked, but it seems highly improbable that this could be true for all 4,301,123 articles. Is the claim true?

Mr. Bultitude
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travisbartley
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    Philosophy, itself leads to "Word", "Universe", "Entity", and then "Philosophy". –  Oct 02 '13 at 10:17
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    [Disproven.](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Dead_end&limit=500&hideredirs=1&hidelinks=1&from=40915776&back=0) There are more than 500 articles which do not obey this. –  Nov 17 '13 at 13:40

1 Answers1

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No.

But, many do. This was first reported by a Wikipedia user, Mark J, when he created the first version of Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy on May 29, 2008. It was later popularized by xkcd.

As per Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy:

As of May 26, 2011, 94.52% of all articles in Wikipedia lead eventually to the article Philosophy. The rest lead to an article with no wikilinks or with links to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops. There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a "classification chain." According to this theory, the Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines on how to write the lead section of an article recommend that the article should start by defining the topic of the article, so that the first link of each page will naturally take the reader into a broader subject, eventually ending in wide-reaching pages such as Mathematics, Science, Language, and of course, Philosophy, nicknamed the "mother of all sciences".

Here is another analysis. And here is another.

The failure cases are split fairly evenly between closed loops not containing Philosophy and chains ending in dead-ends (articles that don't exist, or have been deleted).

One example loop is Waste management -> Waste collection -> Waste management.

The Philosophy article itself is part of a loop: Philosophy -> Reality ->Existence -> Definition -> Meaning_(Linguistic) -> Linguistics -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Proof_(truth) -> Necessity_and_Sufficiency -> Logic -> Reason -> Consciousness -> Quality_(philosophy) -> Property_(Philosophy) -> Modern Philosophy -> Philosophy. Any of these articles would be equally good choices for highlighting this attraction.

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    That's great, we just have to edit 236,000 articles to make the claim true! – travisbartley Aug 09 '13 at 05:17
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    @trav1s, surely much less, if you edit pages linked from many others. – ugoren Aug 09 '13 at 06:48
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    Yup! Just one per loop. Or only the last article in a dead-end chain. –  Aug 09 '13 at 07:07
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    Why would "Philosophy" be the best article in this regard? At the moment, the process described leads from "Philosophy" to (first link) "Reality". So it would seem that the article "Reality" is _at least_ as good at attracting, under this process. So isn't it actually _better_? The answer turns out to be no. From "Philosophy" this process takes us into a cycle that eventually leads back to "Philosophy". So all articles in this cycle are equally good at attracting. – Jeppe Stig Nielsen Aug 09 '13 at 08:24
  • @Jeppe: It seems that is no longer true, if I did not make a mistake. There is a deeper cycle reached from Philosophy not including it. – Ben Aug 09 '13 at 09:55
  • @Ben It might depend on the exact interpretation of the rules, such as "not in parenthesis or italics". ***If*** "Philosophy" leads (now) to a cycle not containing "Philosophy" itself ***then*** the members of that cycle will be "better" attractors than "Philosophy"! – Jeppe Stig Nielsen Aug 09 '13 at 10:36
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    Philosophy *does* lead to philosophy: `Philosophy -> Reality ->Existence -> Definition -> Meaning_(Linguistic) -> Linguistics -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Proof_(truth) -> Necessity_and_Sufficiency -> Logic -> Reason -> Consciousness -> Quality_(philosophy) -> Property_(Philosophy) -> Modern Philosophy -> Philosophy` – Bakuriu Aug 09 '13 at 11:30
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    @Bakuriu In that case, I am for [Science](http://xkcd.com/54/ "It works, bithes") or maybe Logic as base attractor – Tobias Kienzler Aug 09 '13 at 12:14
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    If we exclude redlinks, the percentage would be even higher. So the answer might well be "**almost, but no**" – vsz Aug 09 '13 at 12:39
  • Note that this works only with the assumption we are using English wikipedia. Localized pages can lead to different cycles. – Sulthan Aug 09 '13 at 13:11
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    Most of the wikipedia pages not linking to Philosophy posted on the websites linked above back in 2011 have subsequently been linked to it. I suspect that the proportion of linked pages has by now increased to very nearly 100%. – user3490 Aug 09 '13 at 20:11
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    @user3490, someone will have to get a more recent data dump and run a crawler over each page to get new statistics. – travisbartley Aug 10 '13 at 00:47
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    Funny that waste management now, three years later, leads to philosophy, too: `Waste management -> Waste -> Subjectivity -> Philosophy`. – AlexDeLarge Jun 22 '16 at 09:24