Do All Roads Result in Philosophy on Wikipedia?: They Do About 97.3% of the Time

Pull up the Wikipedia web page for Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love,” the 1984 sin­gle now identified for re-pop­u­lar­iz­ing the style of Japan­ese “metropolis pop.” Then click on the primary of its hyperlinks (not relat­ed to the lan­guage of the arti­cle itself), which ends up in Takeuchi’s personal web page. In case you maintain fol­low­ing that very same professional­ce­dure, you’ll con­tin­ue on to Metropolis Pop, then Japan­ese Pop Music, then Pop­u­lar Music. Preserve drilling down, and also you’ll cross the very con­cepts of music and sound, then enter the realms of physics, the sci­en­tif­ic methodology, log­i­cal propo­si­tions, and the phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage. That is one examination­ple professional­vid­ed by the video above from YouTu­ber Not David, which inves­ti­gates whether or not all roads on Wikipedia even­tu­al­ly result in phi­los­o­phy.

There’s, after all, a Wikipedia web page about this, referred to as “Get­ting to Phi­los­o­phy.” “Fol­low­ing the primary hyper­hyperlink in the principle textual content of an Eng­lish Wikipedia arti­cle, after which repeat­ing the method for sub­se­quent arti­cles, usu­al­ly results in the Phi­los­o­phy arti­cle,” it says. “In Feb­ru­ary 2016, this was true for 97% of all arti­cles on Wikipedia (includ­ing this one).” As for the remainder, they “result in an arti­cle with­out any out­go­ing wik­ilinks, to pages that don’t exist, or get caught in loops.” That is actu­al­ly the case with the trail begin­ing from “Plas­tic Love,” after Phi­los­o­phy of Lan­guage goes in cir­cles round con­cepts, abstrac­tion, and log­ic itself, nev­er fairly attain­ing Phi­los­o­phy prop­er.

Or not less than that’s what hap­pened for me at present; it may go dif­fer­ent­ly tomor­row, or perhaps a few sec­onds from now. Ever since Wikipedia went dwell in 2001, its fundamental dif­fer­ence from oth­er ency­clo­pe­dias has been that it’s con­stant­ly chang­ing, and the speed of that change has solely elevated over time. The “phi­los­o­phy sport,” as Not David calls it, is always sub­ject to interrupt­age, but additionally to un-break­age. At nor­mal occasions, Orange Juice to Phi­los­o­phy takes thir­teen steps, Apple Juice to Phi­los­o­phy takes fif­teen steps; each the Cal­gary Flames and Edmon­ton Oil­ers lie six­teen steps from Phi­los­o­phy. However issues go hay­wire if some­one goes and, say, re-orders the hyperlinks on the Conscious­ness arti­cle so Psy­chol­o­gy comes first.

This stuff hap­pen: Wikipedia is, in spite of everything, the ency­clo­pe­dia that any­one can edit. And as you’ll be able to see (not less than as of this writ­ing), Conscious­ness now hyperlinks first to Phi­los­o­phy once more. These adjustments play hav­oc with the efforts of any­one strive­ing to map out the con­nec­tions between one a part of Wikipedia and anoth­er, as Not David does on this video. However they don’t alter the enjoyable­da­males­tal prin­ci­ples of web­work design, which his analy­sis illu­mi­nates. As with the cor­pus cal­lo­sum, which con­nects the 2 hemi­spheres of the human mind, Phi­los­o­phy is much less impor­tant for what direct­ly con­nects to it than for its personal func­tion as a con­nec­tor. And certainly, haven’t philoso­phers all the time need­ed to understand how each­factor suits togeth­er?

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion of the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy

A Information Visu­al­iza­tion of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy, 1950–2018

Lis­ten to Wikipedia: A Internet Website That Turns Each Wikipedia Edit Into Ambi­ent Music in Actual 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 mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e-book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­e-book.