Do All Roads Lead to Philosophy on Wikipedia?: They Do About 97.3% of the Time

Pull up the Wikipedia page for Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love,” the 1984 sin­gle now known for re-pop­u­lar­iz­ing the genre of Japan­ese “city pop.” Then click the first of its links (not relat­ed to the lan­guage of the arti­cle itself), which leads to Takeuchi’s own page. If you keep fol­low­ing that same pro­ce­dure, you’ll con­tin­ue on to City Pop, then Japan­ese Pop Music, then Pop­u­lar Music. Keep drilling down, and you’ll pass the very con­cepts of music and sound, then enter the realms of physics, the sci­en­tif­ic method, log­i­cal propo­si­tions, and the phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage. This is one exam­ple pro­vid­ed by the video above from YouTu­ber Not David, which inves­ti­gates whether all roads on Wikipedia even­tu­al­ly lead to phi­los­o­phy.

There is, of course, a Wikipedia page about this, called “Get­ting to Phi­los­o­phy.” “Fol­low­ing the first hyper­link in the main text of an Eng­lish Wikipedia arti­cle, and then repeat­ing the process for sub­se­quent arti­cles, usu­al­ly leads to the Phi­los­o­phy arti­cle,” it says. “In Feb­ru­ary 2016, this was true for 97% of all arti­cles on Wikipedia (includ­ing this one).” As for the rest, they “lead to an arti­cle with­out any out­go­ing wik­ilinks, to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops.” This is actu­al­ly the case with the path start­ing from “Plas­tic Love,” after Phi­los­o­phy of Lan­guage goes in cir­cles around con­cepts, abstrac­tion, and log­ic itself, nev­er quite reach­ing Phi­los­o­phy prop­er.

Or at least that’s what hap­pened for me today; it could go dif­fer­ent­ly tomor­row, or even a few sec­onds from now. Ever since Wikipedia went live in 2001, its main dif­fer­ence from oth­er ency­clo­pe­dias has been that it’s con­stant­ly chang­ing, and the rate of that change has only increased over time. The “phi­los­o­phy game,” as Not David calls it, is at all times sub­ject to break­age, but also to un-break­age. At nor­mal times, Orange Juice to Phi­los­o­phy takes thir­teen steps, Apple Juice to Phi­los­o­phy takes fif­teen steps; both the Cal­gary Flames and Edmon­ton Oil­ers lie six­teen steps from Phi­los­o­phy. But things go hay­wire if some­one goes and, say, re-orders the links on the Aware­ness arti­cle so Psy­chol­o­gy comes first.

These things hap­pen: Wikipedia is, after all, the ency­clo­pe­dia that any­one can edit. And as you can see (at least as of this writ­ing), Aware­ness now links first to Phi­los­o­phy again. These changes play hav­oc with the efforts of any­one try­ing to map out the con­nec­tions between one part of Wikipedia and anoth­er, as Not David does in this video. But they don’t alter the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of net­work design, which his analy­sis illu­mi­nates. As with the cor­pus cal­lo­sum, which con­nects the two hemi­spheres of the human brain, Phi­los­o­phy is less impor­tant for what direct­ly con­nects to it than for its own func­tion as a con­nec­tor. And indeed, haven’t philoso­phers always want­ed to know how every­thing fits togeth­er?

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion of the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy

A Data Visu­al­iza­tion of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy, 1950–2018

Lis­ten to Wikipedia: A Web Site That Turns Every Wikipedia Edit Into Ambi­ent Music in Real Time

Philo­graph­ics Presents a Visu­al Dic­tio­nary of Phi­los­o­phy: 95 Philo­soph­i­cal Con­cepts as Graph­ic Designs

Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Course

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.