All Roads Lead to Philosophy

Successively clicking the first link in a Wikipedia article almost always leads to Philosophy

Over the weekend I stumbled across an interesting conference paper: Evaluating and Improving Navigability of Wikipedia. The article shows if you follow the first link in the main text of an English Wikipedia article, and then repeat the process for subsequent articles, it’ll lead you to Philosophy 97% of the time.

Table 3 from Lamprecht et al 2016.

I had my doubts, so I gave this a try with a few topics close to me.

From Data science (6 steps):

Data science → Interdisciplinarity → Academic discipline → Knowledge → Declarative knowledge → Awareness → Philosophy

From Bioinformatics (6 steps):

Bioinformatics → Interdisciplinarity → Academic discipline → Knowledge → Declarative knowledge → Awareness → Philosophy

From my former employer, Colossal Biosciences (7 steps):

Colossal Biosciences → Biotechnology → Natural science → Empirical evidence → Evidence → Proposition → Philosophy of language → Philosophy