All Wikipedia Ends In Philosophy, Literally

Everything is about philosophy, in the end -- at least on Wikipedia.

If you click the first (non-italicized) term of nearly any Wikipedia entry, eventually you end up at their "Philosophy" page. True to form, Wikipedia already has an entry called "Getting to Philosophy," which describes the phenomenon. According to Wikipedia, the effect is true for 94.5% of all entries, and was first discovered in 2008.

Earlier this year, the web community was reminded of the trick by web comic "xkcd," which revealed the info when users hovered over the image with their cursors. At the website Xefer, you can go a step further by mapping out the actual links between various terms on a radial graph, with "Philosophy" as an endpoint, like so:

Wikipedia provides the following instructional list to help people experience this little morsel of accidental meta-Internet humor:

Following the chain consists of: 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

Getting from "Pusha T" to philosophy will make you a believer -- all information is in the end, about information.

Comments

[infonomics]

02:39 AM on 09/15/2012

Entirely consistent with an infinite series of ‘Why” questions: all lead to Schopenhauer’s Will, the thing-in-itself, the noumenon. Try it yourself. Put any phenomenon through a infinite series of 'Why ' questions and you will always come to a question that you cannot answer or a recursive loop which indicates the same unknown. That unknown is Schopenhauer's Will.

[Matt Lindner]

05:59 PM on 11/16/2011

Wow. I just got from "sunglasses" to "Philosophy" in about 12 moves. Pretty cool.

[anfractuous]

10:50 AM on 11/16/2011

This is where the Socratic Method leads - to despondency.

[GM Thomas]

10:35 AM on 11/16/2011

This is actually is right. Without philosophy we are left with scientism. Even the hard sciences keep evolving, major revisions continue to happen in physics for example, they are not able to answer real questions about human experience and our nature. Metaphysics, at the heart of Philosophy along with Ontology (the question of 'being'), allows us to ask about things that even many not exist or our questions about the possibilities, the areas where science does not yet have data or even can find the objects to experiment with ...

[Steg O Saurus]

05:27 PM on 11/15/2011

Interestingly, if you try to do this and land on the page for 'Science' as I did, you get stuck in a loop...

[Steg O Saurus]

05:35 PM on 11/15/2011

Wait, no my mistake :P Didn't read this properly xP

[seanmagee]

01:40 PM on 11/15/2011

I've had my Mind-Blown Moment of the Day!

[Aquinistic]

01:31 PM on 11/15/2011

The interesting thing here is that this kind of occurrence is only "phenomenal" in a society which is surprised to find that philosophy is still working in the background.

Sorry, but the question of our being here--our existence--isn't going to be factually articulated on any search engine.

Even now, in a technological era, as Whitehead said, the whole of Western thought is but a footnote to Plato, which is why, if you follow a wikipedia search far enough, you end in philosophy.

We shouldn't be surprised to come to the realization that, despite how much technology we have, we still don't know ourselves very well. Though, we may ignore the question of being, this doesn;t mean it goes away or is irrelevant. As Heidegger pointed out in the first page of "Being and Time", it makes the question all the more strange. We should be asking: why is the question of existence so blatantly ignored. What functions in the technological era, or the "information age", to keep us from ourselves, or at least asking the question.

I think the irony of this age comes to the fore quickly and its this: You can't use technology to understand technology. I don't mean this in a stupid way; I know that we can plug devices into one another. I'm talking about the "worldview" behind it.

No one should be surprised to know that when it comes down to the question of our existence, you won't find "an app for that".

[Steg O Saurus]

05:44 PM on 11/15/2011

I really don't think it is as complex as you make it sound. The reason this happens is that (as Nihiltres pointed out) the first sentence is very general and puts the article in to a category. These catagories become more general as you move out from article to article. Like if you were on file explorer on a computer and started on a folder and kept moving outwards until you get to 'my computer'.

What's interesting is the face that 'Philosophy' is the 'My Computer' of Wikipedia. That is, most things in this gigantic encyclopaedia come under philosophy. This simply confirms that philosophy i.e. "the love of knowledge" is what Wikipedia is all about.

[Aquinistic]

07:00 PM on 11/15/2011

While I agree with you in the sense that there is a simple and surface explanation for the fact that you end up in philosophy when you search on wikipedia, it would be naive to think that there isn't a deeper way to conceive of this. It's not just wikipedia I'm talking about. I was referring to the worldview which presides over this. It's not just that philosophy is the "my computer" of wikipedia, it is the "my computer" in general. The point is that if your start from specificities and widen out to the more general, you aren't just using a "search engine", you are moving towards what those specificities are grounded in or contained in, and so on. Sooner or later you reach philosophy.

Also, "philosophy" does not etymologically lead to the love of knowledge, but the love of wisdom. This got transformed in the enlightenment when everything became about securing "knowledge".

[Nihiltres]

08:56 AM on 11/15/2011

I don't see why this is a huge surprise. Most descriptive articles will immediately identify the subject and its broader context before moving on to more detail. Usually there's a sentence something like "[Subject] is a [general descriptor] in [context]".

In most cases, we'll see at least one of the general descriptor or the context linked. Since these are almost always more general than the subject of the article itself, the subjects will, as the chain is followed, become increasingly general. Philosophy is essentially the most general subject. Think for a moment about a small child repeatedly asking the question "Why?" in response to some specific question.

See also "Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy" on Wikipedia, which has been around since 2008. Old news.

[AnthropologistAmongApes]

02:49 AM on 11/15/2011

Which is why philosophy is anything but irrelevant to modernity, despite claims to the contrary largely from the right.

[daigz]

12:54 AM on 11/15/2011

But of course. We can't take everything in as absolute fact, can we?

[ray christl]

10:27 PM on 11/14/2011

Love of Wisdom = Philosophy...sounds like a good place to start -- KNOWLEDGE.