All paths lead to "Philosophy"

What will happen if you click on the first links in the articles "Wikipedia"

Do you know the game in which you need to move from one given article on Wikipedia to another for a minimum number of steps? So, the researchers found out that if you click on the first link in the articles, you will almost certainly find yourself in “Philosophy”. In the English Wikipedia, this will happen in 97 percent of cases. In Russian - less often.

In fact, that almost any article can end up in “philosophy” from at least 2008. This was talked about in the podcast Wikipedia Weekly . In addition, in 2011, the Council to try to check the theory appeared in the XKCD comic book . It arises if you put the cursor to the picture.

“A joke from Wikipedia: if you go into any article, click on the first link (which is not in brackets or not highlighted in italics), and then repeat it, in the end you will find yourself in“ Philosophy, ”the XKCD said.

In fact, of course, this does not work with any article. Researchers from Austria and Germany took five million articles from the English Wikipedia and checked the theory . It turned out that it is true for 97 percent of the studied articles. That is, if you click on the first link, given the above rules, then in 97 percent of cases sooner or later you will stumble upon a “ philosophy ”.

Scientists conducted a similar study for articles in seven languages, including Russian. In the Russian Wikipedia, a chance to get to the “ philosophy ”, clicking on the first links in the articles, lower than on Wikipedia in English, is 73.7 percent. For the study, 1.3 million articles were used.

The phenomenon is explained by the fact that, according to the rules for writing articles in Wikipedia, at the very beginning it is necessary to indicate exactly what the subject of publication denotes, and as a rule, this is a broad concept.

Naturally, we tried to check this theory. It turned out that in the English Wikipedia from an article about Vladimir Putin to “philosophy” you can take 10 steps, and in the Russian one in 11. For 15 steps in the English Wikipedia, you can get from an article about Medusa to “Philosophy”.

You can also get to the Russian Wikipedia, for example, from an article about Suyum station in the Penza region . This requires 15 steps.

In general, the most interesting thing is to try yourself. Take a random article on Wikipedia and try to click on the first links in articles that are not enclosed in brackets or not allocated. It is better to start with the English Wikipedia .