

Following the 1st link on Wikipedia leads to 'Philosophy' for 93.4% of pages - p4bl0
http://www.kevinstock.org/2011/05/following-the-first-link-on-wikipedia/

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hugh3
What about for "Philosophy" itself? I tried it and it seems like I wound up in
a loop around "Indo-European languages" which didn't include "Philosophy", but
it's possible I might have accidentally clicked the second link somewhere.

What if you set a bunch of random walkers churning through wikipedia,
following not the first link but a random link from each page? The frequency
with which we wound up visiting any given page would tell us something about
the importance of that subject to the total schema of knowledge that wikipedia
represents.

(That wasn't a particularly good use of the word "schema", I just kinda wanted
to say it.)

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regularfry
I case anyone else is interested, Kevin Bacon is 20 steps from Philosophy.

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hugh3
How about Paul Erdos?

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regularfry
7!

(via <http://ryanelmquist.com/cgi-bin/xkcdwiki>)

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hugh3
What a coincidence, my Erdos number is seven too!

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stcredzero
I did an informal survey, and it seems like the same is true for Conservapedia
and "nation" -- which might be the most common non-stop word spoken on "The
Colbert Report."

<http://www.conservapedia.com/Nation>

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ZackOfAllTrades
I wonder if this will affect how people write Wikipedia articles. Will authors
start trying to point to something obscure now? It would be neat if the guy
went back and did this same analysis in a few months after this sunk into
editors brains.

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joelhaasnoot
Research has also proven that a relatively very small group of contributors
actually make most of the changes on Wikipedia, believe it's in the order of
about 100 people (can't find the link at the moment). It's well possible that
it's a conspiracy, or there's a secret style guide we don't know about.

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SpikeGronim
A small group of contributors make the most edits by count. A diverse group of
contributors write the most prose content, usually on a topic that they're
expert in. So the core wikipedians are organizing/wikifying/categorizing and
that's the bulk of the edits, but the bulk of the content is a different
story.

<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia>

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joelhaasnoot
Ok, so I got the details wrong. However, still think this effect could
partially be explained by the tightly knit community of editors.

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palish
For the lazy, here's an example of this in action:
<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/philosophy.png>

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DiabloD3
As a joke I put Hitler in. Didn't work. Nor did List of Device Bandwidths. Or
Philosophy itself.

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jrussbowman
I think if you do a manual test you'll find that at least some of the ones
posted as ending points also eventually lead to philosophy. I know for example
I hit Knowledge several times on my way to Philosophy on the day I did the
test manually.

Interestingly, Language does create a sort of loop that does never hit
philosophy.

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lotharbot
He didn't declare those pages as ending points, only pages that were reached.

Philosophy is not an ending point either; it's part of a loop, which is why
everything within the loop is at the same percentage.

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basicxman
I wrote a script to use Wikipedia:Random to check as many trails as possible
(still data logging with it now!).

<http://github.com/basicxman/extended-mind>

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personalcompute
Wikipedia provides full database dumps, if you seriously want to check as many
trails as possible. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download>

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redthrowaway
This serves the double purpose of not fragging their servers with bot
requests.

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da_dude4242
Makes sense. Philosophy is the root from which all rigorous knowledge domains
diverged into specializations.

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dhughes
'Mathematics' and 'property' seem to be where a lot of articles lead to which
then ends at 'Philosophy'.

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jtreminio
Doesn't work for 'porn', ends in a loop.

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hugh3
Interestingly, "porn" may be one of the few English words for which wikipedia
is not among the top ten hits of a google search.

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p4bl0
This time there is statistics computed using a wikipedia dump :-).

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Jd
This isn't useful at all and doesn't even make sense, ironically since "sense"
is the first listing.

Title is also completely wrong. It isn't 93.4 % of pages, it is 93.4 % of
pages in certain categories (primarily dealing w/ philosophy)

Beyond that, are "sense" or "Perception" the name of a category of pages and
the percentage the percentage of pages in that category that lead back to
"philosophy" or are they individual pages?

If they are individual pages, you shouldn't have a percentage, you should
simply have a yes/no. If they are categories, how could the percentages
possibly be the same for different categories? And how could this large number
of pages all form a loop?

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sorbus
> 93.4 % of pages in certain categories (primarily dealing w/ philosophy)

Per the article, this was from an entire database dump of wikipedia.

> Beyond that, are "sense" or "Perception" the name of a category of pages and
> the percentage the percentage of pages in that category that lead back to
> "philosophy" or are they individual pages?

> If they are individual pages, you shouldn't have a percentage, you should
> simply have a yes/no. If they are categories, how could the percentages
> possibly be the same for different categories? And how could this large
> number of pages all form a loop?

Those are individual pages. The percentage refers to the percentage of _other_
wikipedia pages which eventually reach them, by following the first link in
the page. The loop is formed when by following the first links in pages
beginning at an article you eventually return to that article; it is,
obviously, possible to enter the loop from other pages.

I encourage you to go to wikipedia and play around with following the first
link in each article (not in parenthesis or italics) for a bit, as it seems
like actually going through that process would alleviate your confusion and
lack of understanding.

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Jd
Thanks for the correction. Totally misunderstood the article.

I still find it incredible and hard to believe that 89.60% of Wikipedia
articles end up at Modern Philosophy.

