Following the first
link in the main text of an
English Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually leads to the
Philosophy article. In February 2016, this was true for 97% of all articles on Wikipedia[1] (including this one), an increase from 94.52% in 2011. The remaining articles lead to an article without any outgoing wikilinks, to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops. After
an edit to the
Awareness article in April of 2024, among others switching the order of Philosophy and
Psychology, the number of articles that lead to Philosophy this way has been greatly reduced, as Awareness and Psychology form a loop of their own. Since the edit, there had been numerous attempts to switch the order of the links leading to a discussion on the Awareness talk page.[2] However, now, the order has been reverted back so philosophy remains first.
Crawl on Wikipedia from random article to PhilosophyGraph created (
c. April 2015) with the xefer[3] tool
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 articles begin by defining the topic of the article. A consequence of this style is that the first sentence of an article is almost always a definitional statement, a direct answer to the question "what is [the subject]?"
Method summarized
Following the chain consists of:
Clicking on the first non-parenthesized, non-italicized link within the article body.
Infobox links should be ignored, with the first infobox link (if applicable) generally being dictated by the structure of the infobox rather than the choices actively made by the authors of the article.
Ignoring external links or red links (links to non-existent pages)
Stopping when reaching "Philosophy", or a page with no links, or when a loop occurs[4]
Mathematician
Hannah Fry demonstrated the method in the 'Marmalade', 'socks' and 'One Direction'[5] section of the 2016 BBC Documentary The Joy of Data.[6]
Origins
The
phenomenon has been known since at least 26 May 2008, when an earlier version[7] of this page was created by user
Mark J.[8] Two days later, it was mentioned in
episode 50 of the
podcastWikipedia Weekly, which may have been its first public mention.[9]
A web page that renders links graphically in a tree (detects loops and uses the second link to always complete the process)
Wikilope is a command line utility and Node.js library that can do various queries on Wikipedia pages, including the get to "Philosophy" effect.
Getting to Philosophy, a
Node.js library that allows to query any Wikipedia page and get the different pages names that will get to "Philosophy" (also avoids loops and use the second link)
A YouTube video demonstrating this observation, which starts with a random article and eventually ends up in the article
Philosophy
Analysis showing that over 95% of Wikipedia articles get to Philosophy