{"id":2848,"date":"2011-05-26T19:10:22","date_gmt":"2011-05-26T18:10:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=2848"},"modified":"2011-05-26T19:10:22","modified_gmt":"2011-05-26T18:10:22","slug":"xkcd-inspired_wikipedia_fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2011\/05\/26\/xkcd-inspired_wikipedia_fun\/","title":{"rendered":"XKCD-inspired Wikipedia fun"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/903\/\">Yesterday&rsquo;s comic at XKCD<\/a> includes an interesting bit of Wikipedia trivia: &ldquo;if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at &quot;Philosophy&quot;&rdquo;.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI tried a few random Wikipedia articles (<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tiny_Thompson\">a random link from the Wikipedia front page<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/cucumber\">cucumber<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Georgia\">Georgia<\/a>) and it worked in all cases. The tendency became obvious after just a few hops: we skirted linguistics, science, then information, and via quantity on to philosophy.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nFrom philosophy it&rsquo;s six hops back around to science and you can go another round. The full loop is Science &gt; Knowledge &gt; Fact &gt; Information &gt; Sequence &gt; Mathematics &gt; Quantity &gt; Property_(philosophy) &gt; Modern_philosophy &gt; Philosophy &gt; Existence &gt; Sense &gt; Organism &gt; Biology &gt; Natural_science &gt; Science. So you could equally well argue that all Wikipedia queries have their root in Existence, or in Knowledge, or in Information. Whatever you think is the most fundamental of all &ndash; take your pick.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nNow some developer has actually made a tool for you to try this on your own: <a href=\"http:\/\/ryanelmquist.com\/cgi-bin\/xkcdwiki\">xkcd wikipedia steps to philosophy<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday&rsquo;s comic at XKCD includes an interesting bit of Wikipedia trivia: &ldquo;if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at &quot;Philosophy&quot;&rdquo;. I tried a few random Wikipedia articles (a random link from the Wikipedia front page, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-favourites_on_the_web","category-geeky_things"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2848"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2851,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2848\/revisions\/2851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}