
Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop - seangransee
http://wikiloopr.com/
======
lbarrow
From a mathematical perspective, this is actually not that surprising.

Think of the act of clicking the first link in the Wikipedia article as a
function that takes in the page you're on and outputs another page.

If you call this function on itself over and over again (ie use the output of
one step as in the input of the next step), you will eventually enter a loop.
The proof of this is simple: there are only a finite number of Wikipedia
articles, therefore you must eventually reach an article you've seen before.
(This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be
chaotic.)

Since it's necessarily true that all articles will eventually reach a loop
when you iteratively click the first link, we have to ask: how unusual is it
that they usually reach the SAME loop?

~~~
klawed
Agreed. I'd love to know how many _different_ cycles the wikipedia article
graph contains. If most articles lead to 1 out of 20 possible cycles, it's
much less interesting than if it's 1 out of 5,000,000.

~~~
momotomo
I've been looking to do something like this with the Networkx library in
Python, though on an internal company MediaWiki with a much smaller article
base. Going to try to visualise much the same thing, the major loops and
cliques in the graph.

------
johnbender
This may be hyper naive but is this the consequence of beginning most articles
representing the current topic as a more specific form of another topic?

For example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra>

"Algebra ... is a branch of mathematics." (mathematics being a link)

So if you continue to generalize you'll end up at the most general subject
which appears to be philosophy.

[update] added an example

~~~
dude_abides
ah so thats why the degree is called Doctor of Philosophy?! Thanks for the
enlightenment! I've wondered quite a lot of times why I'm a Doctor of
Philosophy in Computer Science, and not Doctor of Computer Science.

~~~
fhars
Traditionally, a university had four faculties, the lower or artists faculty,
and the three higher faculties of theology, law and medicine. Students would
start in the artists faculty learning the seven liberal arts (grammar,
rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (including
astrology)) to become a magister artium (M.A.) and then go to one of the
higher faculties to get their doctorate (Th.D, LL.D or M.D., respectively).
Philosophy and science (née natural philosophy) developed in the artists
faculty and over time became important enough to grant the artists faculty the
right to grant doctorates, too, with philosophy leading the way. That's why
many science faculties, which split off of the artists faculty over the
centuries still grant the title of a doctor of philosophy.

Ah, and the first three of the liberal arts that were the first thing a
student learned, grammar, rhetoric and logic, were called the trivium, hence
the modern word "trivial" for obvious things everyone should know.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Really cool comment, I love finding interesting trivia in forums.

~~~
svasan
> 'interesting trivia'

In the above - grammar, rhetoric, logic - formed the "trivium" and -
arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy - formed the "quadrivium".

Also "trivium" represented the place where three roads would intersect. People
would meet here and exchange pleasantries and gossip. That is how you get the
current meaning of the word "trivia".

------
encoderer
This is beautiful. I've always thought sites like IMDB and Wikipedia are
hypertext expressions of the purest form.

As a nerdy kid, over a few years I read my way through a significant chunk of
the early 1990's Groliers Encyclopedia set my Grandma bought me at Krogers.
And it was never cover-to-cover reading, instead it was filled with hopping
around, page-to-page, volume-to-volume. Start at oscilloscope, but what's a
cathode ray? And then it's in television? How does broadcasting work? I'd sit
on the floor with a half dozen open encyclopedias open around me, the same way
we can do now with browser tabs.

Wikipedia has many flaws, but it's a fantastic tool and I'd have killed for it
as a 12 year old with 5 volumes of an encyclopedia in my backpack!

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Ah yes. To me (to my productivity's detriment...) quite often when I visit
Wikipedia it becomes a learning adventure. From one thing you can hop to the
other, finding out all sorts of interesting and obscure things. To a curious
mind like mine, Wikipedia is heaven!

~~~
pattern
For myself, I would broaden this and say that almost every link I visit on HN,
or every forum post I read leads to more than 1 additional link. Thus three
windows of Chrome open with 10+ tabs each :)

I find this drill-down effect to be quite illuminating, if not productive.
Strangely, it seems to provide both depth and breadth of topics in relatively
equal measures.

------
sp332
As far as I know, this was noticed in May last year on the xkcd forums.
[http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309](http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309)
There's a writeup of it with a gigantic picture over here:
<http://www.mrphlip.com/wikiphilosophy/>

~~~
tonylampada
Seems like there is an even older link here on HN
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584896>

~~~
sp332
OK, and this game <http://spu.co/get-to-philosophy> was played at least as far
back as August 2010.

------
clemesha
I have a site: <http://TheWikiGame.com> that makes a game out of a related
idea (finding the connection between Wikipedia articles).

Recently, I've been giving access to the game data to people (like university
researchers, etc) to test different theories on path connections made by real
people, etc.

The game has now been running for over 3 years, has about 1.19 million
players, playing over 1.37 million games, with about 1.22 million won games
(successful start/end article connection).

Got a really cool application for all the game data? I'd love to hear:
alex@thewikigame.com

~~~
loumf
Maybe the interesting part is the 150,000 lost games.

~~~
lachenmayer
Surely most of those are just abandoned games?

------
zyb09
Nobody linked xkcd yet? Relevant Alt-Text: <http://xkcd.com/903/>

------
anvandare
Wikipedia is aware of this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy>

~~~
scotttobejoking
As they describe in the page, when you describe something, you are trying to
place it within a general framework.

In trying to describe a domain in an encyclopedia, it does little good to use
language specific to the domain. If your reader doesn't know what Biology is,
it's little use trying to describe it in terms of Microbiology and Immunology.
You have to use more general language.

There are are few words more general and meaningless in our language than
"organization".

edit - grammar

------
pavel_lishin
Seems like it would be nice to cache some of these requests, instead of
repeatedly hammering the Wikipedia API. And why is it grabbing images?

<http://i.imgur.com/KSju9.png>

(Incidentally, my test case for the screenshot did not lead to Philosophy!)

~~~
seangransee
totally agree. i hacked this together pretty quickly last night. definitely a
lot of room for improvement. thanks for the feedback!

~~~
bloaf
It looks like there is a bug where it doesn't fetch the correct page:

<http://wikiloopr.com/anime>

~~~
seangransee
fixed

------
api
Either philosophy is a dead end, then, or it is the base of all knowledge.
Depends on whether knowledge is a tree or a graph, which is... a philosophical
question!

My brain exploded.

~~~
beala
If there is some characteristic Q that is true of all knowledge, then Q must
be true of Q. A cycle!

~~~
Cushman
Only if Q is knowable.

------
kevinh
I seem to have broken it here:
[http://wikiloopr.com/List%20of%20minor%20planets:%2075001%E2...](http://wikiloopr.com/List%20of%20minor%20planets:%2075001%E2%80%9376000)

Wikipedia page:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planets:_75001%E2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planets:_75001%E2%80%9376000)

That is, however, a weird Wikipedia page. It seems like the first link is a
target to another location on the page, which (I'd assume) would put it in an
infinite loop.

~~~
planckscnst
"Egypt" also breaks.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
It's funny, but it's true that everything in life ultimately leads back to
philosophy.

As noted by XKCD, everything is based on something else:
<http://xkcd.com/435/>

And I think after Maths on that should come Philosophy.

~~~
bloaf
"Nematode" and "Flow (psychology)" stop at "psychology" which I think is just
another example of that discipline putting on airs.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
That's changed now, thanks to me.

------
ErrantX
Guys :) This is always fun when it crops up - especially the musing on how
deeply rooted the topic of philosophy is.

But _please_ don't go editing articles to improve the loops or otherwise
change them. Unless of course the change is beneficial to the article.

It's like going for a walk somewhere fascinating; enjoy the view, but leave
nothing behind :)

------
BlackJack
What happens for Biology? <http://wikiloopr.com/Biology>. For me, it goes down
until it gets to Biology, and then highlights Biology over and over.

    
    
      Biology
      Natural science
      Science
      Knowledge
      Fact
      Proof (truth)
      Argument
      Philosophy
      Problem
      Doubt
      Belief
      Proposition
      Logic
      Reason
      Human
      Mammal
      Class (biology)
      Biological classification
      Organism
      Biology
    

The first link on the Wikipedia page for Biology is "Biology(disambiguation)",
but the first textual link is "Natural Science". I assume it loops on Biology
because it keeps going back between Biology (the article) and Biology
(disambiguation), but that doesn't explain why the first redirect is to
Natural Science in the very beginning.

Am I just missing something here?

Edit: This no longer happens. Now it properly loops on Philosophy and
Proposition.

------
usea
Here is a similar visualization of the phenomenon from last year
<http://xefer.com/wikipedia>

~~~
creamyhorror
This is a superior visualisation in my opinion - it actually builds you a tree
of links as you enter subsequent searches. Quite interesting to see how
article chains cluster into 3 or 4 different "main branches".

~~~
ianstormtaylor
Except there's no autocomplete. I couldn't match Carly rae jepsen... but once
you get it, it is much cooler.

------
RyanMcGreal
Works for:

* Carly Rae Jepson

* Paul is dead

* Telephony

* Easter Island

* Drum and bass

* Sunglasses

* CAT 5

* Willy Wonka

* Black hole

* Vancouver

* Cloud Cuckoo Land

* Bacon

* Radish

* Brunette

* Dunning-Kruger Effect

* Lady Gaga

* Sailor Moon

If the chain hits Philosophy first, it converges on Philosophy/Argument. If it
hits Fact first, it converges on Fact/Truth.

------
ksmiley
I can't replicate it, but I encountered a weird bug. I entered "Star Trek" and
hit Enter. The suggested items list appeared and I clicked on "Star Trek".
Page titles appeared as normal, but everything appeared twice, like so:

    
    
      Star Trek
      Star Trek
      Cinema of the United States
      Film
      Cinema of the United States
      Recording
      Data
      Level of measurement
      Film
      ...etc until the last page title, "Reality"
    

Seems like two processes were running in parallel and outputting to the same
stream.

~~~
xiaoma
I also got a weird one:

    
    
        Anime
        Animation
        The page you specified doesn't exist

~~~
aptwebapps
That's funny because the first link on the Animation page is

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion>

Is that an Easter Egg (illusion == doesn't exist)?

------
njharman
I love wiki. I spend hours following links. Having loops is a feature or else
I might never stop.

Greek City States ->

    
    
      Polis
      City
      Human settlement
      Statistics
      Data
      Level of measurement
      Stanley Smith Stevens
      United States
      Federalism
      Politics
      Art
      Human behavior
      Behavior
      Organism
      Biology
      Natural science
      Science
      Knowledge
      Fact
      Proof (truth)
      Argument
      Philosophy
      Problem
      Doubt
      Belief
      Proposition loops to Philosophy

------
joelverhagen
When images appear first in the page's source, the wrong link is chosen. I
assume you are trying to go for the first link, as a human reader would see
it.

For example, the page on Anime:

<http://wikiloopr.com/Anime>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anime&action=e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anime&action=edit)

~~~
seangransee
thanks! gonna fix that later

------
fchollet
<http://wikiloopr.com/whale>

"Whale" leads to the "pinniped"/"marine mammal" loop. How about that one?

------
001sky
_In fact, according to a crawl of the Wikipedia database from May 2011, nearly
95% of Wikipedia articles will take you back to Philosophy._

\- Always interested in the backstory of folks that sit around thinking this
stuff up (and then testing it).

<http://www.syndiosocial.com/the-philosophy-of-networks/>

------
svdad
I think this is fairly trivially explained in most cases by the fact that
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Almost by construction, nearly every article
starts with "X is a Y" (modulo grammatical niceties) where Y is a more general
class to which X belongs. In cases when the article doesn't follow that form,
the first linked term is usually still explanatory or definitional in some
sense and hence more general, and cases where that doesn't apply (e.g.
Obstacle) are unusual enough that they don't generally break the cycles. There
are no "Wikipedia axioms" that I know of, so this is pretty much guaranteed to
end in a cycle looping through a limited set of terms used to talk about
abstract concepts. Hence Philosophy.

------
ThisIBereave
One of these, at least, is supported by a pretty weird edit:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&diff=51...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&diff=510188633&oldid=510134116)

------
urza
Few days ago, when this was on MainPage, it ended in different loop than now.

Today most articles ends in cycle between Philosophy and Modern Philosophy.. (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_philosophy> )

few days ago, it was cycling between Philosophy and Agency (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)> )

What changed and why?

~~~
urza
Aha, someone changed the first link on page Problem from purpose to obstacle.

Its a little bit like butterfly effect :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Problem&action...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Problem&action=history)

------
pooriaazimi
You have a bug. Pages like <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc>. (note the
dot at the end) have a "geographic coordinate system" link at the top, that
isn't part of the article. So queries like <http://wikiloopr.com/Steve%20Jobs>
are actually returning wrong results.

~~~
bandwevil
Yep, it's seeing the "Coordinates" link at the top right corner of the page.

------
CodeCube
This is the shortest one I've found so far -
<http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python>

~~~
seangransee
here's the shortest one i've found: <http://wikiloopr.com/home>

------
joshaidan
Oh, I think I found one that doesn't loop:

Port Arthur <http://wikiloopr.com/Port%20Arthur>

Either that, I found a bug.

~~~
rogerbinns
Not as dramatic but <http://wikiloopr.com/Nelson> ends up with Great Britain
(and then claims it loops to itself with no intermediaries).

------
mildweed
Epistemology reigns supreme.

~~~
eevilspock
How do you know?

------
DesaiAshu
Does this hold true with following the xth link on the page? I'd predict it
does, but the further x is from 1, the longer the average chain before you get
to the loop (by virtue of definitions being at the top of wiki articles, then
at some point the average length would hit a consistent level). Would love to
see this modified to let you determine x.

------
jahewson
I quite like the loop between Doubt and Belief <http://wikiloopr.com/Doubt>

~~~
guac
The loop found for "Psychology" is pretty neat:
<http://wikiloopr.com/Psychology>

Edit: Looks like somebody is editing certain articles that don't have
philosophy as the first link to have it. Psychology used to loop with itself
through like 5 intermediates.

------
dirtyaura
After having twenty tries that got me into the philosophy loop, I started to
think what are the most basic concepts that philosophy is "made of". Maybe I
could escape the loop that way?

And lo and behold, I tried word "word" and it loops between "emotion" and
"psychology". <http://wikiloopr.com/word>

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I fixed that.

~~~
dirtyaura
So did you edit Wikipedia to ensure the Philosophy loop?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Yes.

~~~
ralfd
Now it loops between "Human" and "Reason". I think there are two secret cabals
at work. One to break the Philosophy link and one to thwart these evil
schemes.

------
fasteddie31003
This reminds me of a game I used to play as an intern with other interns to
kill time. Someone would pick a Wikipedia article deep down in the bowels of
Wikipedia and we would race to the article from Wikipedia only using links. We
could get the article surprisingly fast, most within only 5 intermediate page
visits from the homepage.

------
JohnsonB
This behaves erratically. Sometimes it considers the coordinates link, above
the entire article the "first link" (in the "Michael Phelps" chain), sometimes
not (Chicago). Consequentially, I believe "Michael Phelps", when the
coordinate link is ignored, leads to it's own loop that is not the philosophy
loop in question.

------
PuercoPop
Nice demo, but I think it is an incorrect asumption that the first link is to
a broader subject. For example, for Perú it says: "It is bordered on the north
by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil" So Perú->Ecuador left me with
a big wtf..

<http://wikiloopr.com/Peru>

------
seangransee
about an hour after posting this, someone changed the philosophy page so the
philosophy-reality loop doesn't happen.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy>

it still brings you to a loop, but it's not an immediate back-and-forth
between the last two.

------
rane
I don't think the loop is the interesting part, what's interesting is that
articles lead to philosophy.

------
joshaidan
Funny... As I was playing with this, somebody changed the order of:

"In philosophy and sociology..."

On the Agency (philosophy) page. This changed the output of the results, but
in the end the loop still existed. However, I couldn't help but feel like
someone is trying to hack the matrix.

------
chrishas35
Someone just changed the Reason page [1] which is now putting the focus on
Biology instead of Philosophy.

1:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&oldid=5...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&oldid=510134116)

------
hoprocker
Puts me in mind of Translation Party[1] (which is back up, kudos to WillC and
Rick!). There's a lot to be entertained via this sort of vertex-following
algorithm.

[1] <http://translationparty.com/>

------
pohl
Here's one that - if executed on the Federation computer on board the Starship
Enterprise - would make smoke and sparks fly from the terminal...

<http://wikiloopr.com/Reince%20Priebus>

------
prezjordan
I played with this [1] when I first started programming in Ruby. The results
were super interesting (but now I regret not using the Wikipedia API...)

[1] <https://gist.github.com/1654064>

------
freejoe76
Strangely, <http://wikiloopr.com/Tacos> takes you to a different loop than
<http://wikiloopr.com/Burritos>

~~~
seangransee
clearly burritos are the more logical thing to eat

------
tg3
Interestingly, Paul Graham [1] leads to the photographer, but still leads back
to the Web before heading to philosophy/proposition.

[1] <http://wikiloopr.com/Paul%20Graham>

------
drewmclellan
Keith Chegwin gets stuck in Great Britain, which is probably for the best.

------
manish_gill
I remember someone on reddit posting a python script that does the same thing
(following the wiki chain to Philosophy).

Amusingly, my test got stuck in a loop between Science and Natural Science. :)

------
zerop
All roads lead to Mathematics answers it -- <http://www.xamuel.com/all-roads-
lead-to-mathematics/>

------
wkral
You could optimize this a bit by caching the loops, I noticed some pauses
between Fact and Truth, seeing as how that loop always comes up it would be
nice to cache it.

------
sageikosa
And if you go to the last link in any regular paragraph (not footnotes nor
tables, nor references) you may often end up bouncing around sports teams.

------
leh0n
<http://wikiloopr.com/Gate%20City%20Bank> I think this one is bugged haha

------
dinedal
Looks like <http://wikiloopr.com/Crystal> breaks it (The loop has no other
end)

~~~
seangransee
Right now it appears to be looping between Natural Science and Physics. But
they're really far apart so you might not seem them on your screen at once.

------
Evgeniuz
The first word I tried — jeans — and it failed to make philosophy loop :)
Apparently, any articles from generated list will fail too.

~~~
crazypyro
Jeans made the philosophy loop for me?

<http://i.imgur.com/rgMkh.png>

~~~
Evgeniuz
Somehow there was Emotion/Psychology loop there. Now it goes even further,
than yours image, the loop is Argument/Philosophy now. Clearly, wikipedia is
changing or tool was enhanced :)

------
Aldor
<http://wikiloopr.com/texting> Yay! FInally found one that doesn't work.

~~~
DanBC
That loops between philosophy and preposition.

~~~
sp332
It's been modified since then.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_messaging...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_messaging&action=history)

------
Bjoern
Bangkok is 25 and Chopsticks loops with itself.

------
jdpage
Interestingly, things like "Hat", "Shoe", and "Human" end up in a
Psychology/Emotion loop, rather than the Philosophy loop.

------
strongriley
I think I beat it... <http://wikiloopr.com/Caterham%20CSR>

------
godDLL
<http://wikiloopr.com/Sigur%20Rós> did I break it?

------
steeleduncan
I wonder if this says more about the people who write the articles or the
nature of the subjects themselves?

------
JacobIrwin
'television' was the first search term I could find that broke the loop - on
the fifth or sixth attempt

------
bayesbiol
WikiRaces! <https://twitter.com/wikiraces>

------
wowfat
Try this <http://wikiloopr.com/kumbanad>

------
d4nt
"HTML5 Canvas" gets into a loop on Truth ... Fact ... Truth. Not the usual
philosophy loop.

------
dewarrn1
Interesting find: "Sherlock Holmes" avoids the Argument/Philosophy loop;
"Poirot" does not.

------
seangransee
yesterday, the loop was always the same. since this made it to the top of
hacker news, the loop has been changing. look at the revision history of some
of those pages and you'll see that people on wikipedia are messing with the
loop.

------
jamescun
We used to play this as a game back in high school. First one to find the loop
won.

~~~
INTPenis
Same but at the boring callcenter job I had at the time. Dell Enterprise
support, we would get virtually no calls sometimes and we would make up shit
to find on wikipedia and whoever found it from a specified starting point in
the least amount of jumps won.

------
m3mnoch
i started with "The Tyger" and got this:

    
    
      The Tyger
      William Blake
      Romanticism
      Industrial Revolution
      United Kingdom
      Britain (placename)
      Great Britain
    

_shrug_ apparently, william blake is indisputable.

m3mnoch.

------
andrewmunsell
I got stuck in a philosophy-argument loop instead of philosophy-reality ;)

------
twodayslate
I thought Wikipedia hates sites like this. The do more harm than good.

------
tantalor
First two I tried led to different loops:

1\. Elephant (Mammal ... Human)

2\. Big Bang (Fact ... Truth)

------
pitchups
I think this works for any link, not just the first link.

------
TapaJob
"Greg James" As in Radio one DJ.....Doesnt work!

------
dkroy
Are there any major articles that don't loop?

~~~
seangransee
maybe not major, but the ones i've found so far that don't do it are

<http://wikiloopr.com/home> <http://wikiloopr.com/chopsticks>
<http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python>

~~~
seangransee
also, anything that leads to marriage <http://wikiloopr.com/dating>

------
tomelders
Shakespeare - 28 links. My personal best.

~~~
incision
MAF [1] - 30. Though, it's a bit of a cheat since the first page is surely
disambiguation.

I also found M62 Locomotive [2] at 26 to be interesting.

1: <http://wikiloopr.com/MAF>

2: <http://wikiloopr.com/M62%20locomotive>

------
zerostar07
In another time it would lead to "God"

------
scurvyscott
"booger" doesn't do it. Just sayin.

------
milkshakes
ironically, starting at "strange loop" avoids the repetitive philosophical
argument

~~~
pdx
That works because somebody is being funny, and created a self referential
strange loop inside Wikipedia.

That's a good find you found. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loops>

~~~
sp332
Hofstadter was a genius, one of his books was called "I am a Strange Loop" and
xkcd (jokingly) reported that his autobiography reads:

    
    
      I'm
      so
      meta
      even
      this
      acronym

~~~
RenierZA
Here it is: <http://xkcd.com/917/>

------
zapt02
TIL Wikipedia has a JSON API!

------
sixQuarks
"Honda" only goes 3 links

~~~
stigi
<http://wikiloopr.com/home> Home - Residence - Home

------
dhughes
"Lies" doesn't work.

------
dakimov
Wikipedia is a dense oriented graph, no wonder it has many cycles. What's the
big deal?

------
DelvarWorld
Pseudodiarrhea gave me a unique loop.

