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".
sorry to say, but couldn't you have thought about that before posting it on HN? you're on the front page, if your site really runs without caching, you must be wasting an enormous amount of WP's resources.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
Another way of thinking about it: There are N nodes that loop back to themselves. When starting at a given node, what are the odds that you'll never hit one of these N nodes? Additionally, we know that many of the N nodes are very general ones, like "truth", under which many topics roll up.
This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be chaotic
Without more information, I don't think this is true. It is true if the transition function between states depends on a finite number of previous ones (WLOG if s_n is a function of only s_{n-1}), but I think that it isn't if the transition depends on an infinite number.
(Though, in this case, clearly there is no history, so what you say is true.)
If your model only depends on at most a maximum fixed length of history, you can always model your finite systems to only depend on the most recent state. (Just make a copy of the history part of that state.)
In the case of depending on up to an infinite history, I wouldn't call that system to have a finite number of states any longer.
The fact that many lead to the same loop(1) of Argument <-> Logic in unsurprising, too. Wikipedia articles usually define their subject in in the first sentence. Defining things works by saying what general category they belong to, then by differentiating them within that.
E.g.
A fish is any member of a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is an American _multinational corporation_ which provides Internet-related products and services [...]
A table is a form of _furniture_ with a flat and satisfactory horizontal upper surface [...]
And so on. If you always walk up the abstraction chain because you're picking the first link (the general category), you'll end up at the root of the categorization tree, which is likely something along the lines of Argument, Logic, Fact etc.
Note however that the current state of wikipedia has a different root loop for me, Logic leads to Philosophy.
(1) or one of a very limited number of loops, I also saw Science <-> Knowledge.
170 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy
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
http://i.imgur.com/KSju9.png
(Incidentally, my test case for the screenshot did not lead to Philosophy!)
http://wikiloopr.com/anime
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/wiki/Illusion
Is that an Easter Egg (illusion == doesn't exist)?
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!
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.
[1] https://gist.github.com/1654064
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.
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.
I also found M62 Locomotive [2] at 26 to be interesting.
1: http://wikiloopr.com/MAF
2: http://wikiloopr.com/M62%20locomotive
[1] http://wikiloopr.com/Paul%20Graham
As noted by XKCD, everything is based on something else: http://xkcd.com/435/
And I think after Maths on that should come Philosophy.
My brain exploded.
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?
Without more information, I don't think this is true. It is true if the transition function between states depends on a finite number of previous ones (WLOG if s_n is a function of only s_{n-1}), but I think that it isn't if the transition depends on an infinite number.
(Though, in this case, clearly there is no history, so what you say is true.)
In the case of depending on up to an infinite history, I wouldn't call that system to have a finite number of states any longer.
E.g.
A fish is any member of a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is an American _multinational corporation_ which provides Internet-related products and services [...]
A table is a form of _furniture_ with a flat and satisfactory horizontal upper surface [...]
And so on. If you always walk up the abstraction chain because you're picking the first link (the general category), you'll end up at the root of the categorization tree, which is likely something along the lines of Argument, Logic, Fact etc.
Note however that the current state of wikipedia has a different root loop for me, Logic leads to Philosophy.
(1) or one of a very limited number of loops, I also saw Science <-> Knowledge.