How One Small Change Broke Wikipedia's First Link Rule

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What happens when you follow the first link on wikipedia pages to its end? I tried to find out and regretted the resulting headache.

I had to cut out a lot of details due to time/pacing but if there is something that interested you in terms of how I gathered data or whatever, feel free to ask.

The wikipedia first link network featured in the video is on github:

Chapters:
0:00 Trying to get a wikipedia page
1:45 Getting the data/ Rules
3:50 Do all wiki pages lead to philosophy?
7:58 The big loop/ What's special about philosophy?
11:46 Results
12:32 Someone broke the philosophy game
16:47 The second link network

Non-public domain Image credits:

Music (in order):
Not David Spotify playlist featuring artists below and others:

Fate - Seimuc

Native - HOME

Above All - HOME
(see link above)

Sure Thing - Chris Doerksen
(see link above)

Broken Drum Machine - Godmode (YouTube audio library)

Sunrise in Paris - Dan Henig (YouTube audio library)

Forward - Seimuc
(see link above)

RPG Store - Chris Doerksen
(see link above)

[not_David]

How did you get from the 'Banana' wiki page to 'Neptune' (the planet)? (edit: y'all are way better at this than I am, I thought 7 was pretty good -_-) Also, please do not edit wikipages for the link games. The analysis here was just for a bit of fun and at no point did I edit any pages, please respect wikipedia :)

[soulcantspeech]

fun fact: this video started at wikipedia and networks and ended at philosophy, just like all good video essays and all good wikipedia articles

[FissionCube]

fun fact about the moth thing, theres this tumblr blog that will remove all letters except CGAT from a given post, run them through the genome database and find the closest match. and because most of the animals whose genome has been fully sequenced are moths, most posts will end up as a species of moth. so like it may not be the moth game on wikipedia but it is the moth game in genome databases.

[notoriouswhitemoth]

Why do all roads lead to philosophy? Because if you're picking something at random and always asking the first question you come across, you're inevitably going to end up talking about why ideas are what they are, which is what philosophy is. It's equivalent to a toddler responding to everything with "why?" Because they're learning to ask questions.

[HyprSachi]

i love how upon watching the intro i went to wikipedia and tried it myself and the first thing i tried was NGE (i'm obsessed with the show), and then later in the video is listed as the first example of a page that does lead to philosophy lmao

[zsh]

The fact that it is now the “awareness” game is a big win for idealism

[Carhill]

"How important is philosophy actually?"

Truly a question for the ages..

[Zaro]

I think the example at the beginning shows it perfectly.

Orange juice > Orange > Fruit > Botany > Science > Scientific method > Empirical evidence > Proposition > Philosophy

It gets more and more fundamental unti we end up at philosophy, the most fundermental concept

[YandiBanyu]

I love that you mention you just edit the page locally as that could actually make some wikipedia moderator panic 😂

[IsaqueFontinele]

The fact that all this analysis could grant you a published article, but instead we have a nicely explained video, is awesome! Thanks for the great work done!

[merri.d]

I'm beginning to think 'maybe the connections were the friends we made along the way' is the ultimate conclusion to networking theory.

[someonelucas]

1:54 Banana to Neptune can be done much quicker even, Banana -> radioactivity -> neptunium-237 -> Neptune is only 3 links

[Artyomi]

"What makes Philosophy so special" - I guess answering that is the entire point of philosophy

[iamsushi]

the xkcd ruleset is first non-italicised, non-parenthesis'd link in the article, which is pretty consistent in most languages

[lourensed]

the editing that goes into these visualizations is insane, on top of the research behind it. props

[Nibiri]

fun fact: apparently, they got so fed up with people changing it that they just straight up somewhat placed some sort of a guard on the pages connecting to philosophy (mainly with the reasoning of the edits not actually contributing to the page or something), meaning they'll just straight up undo any edits that try to break the rule

[onenameddome]

Now the next question we could ask is, "Is this true in all languages?". Is there some other center in other languages, have other languages even a center or comparable structur?

[AnotherRoof]

I first heard about this in a talk by Hannah Fry about eight years ago. I check in on it now and then -- it switches between being broken / philosophy fairly often. When it is broken, I find that introductory paragraphs of neighbouring articles are written a bit more ham-fistedly which makes me think that people break it on purpose. "Philosophy" might be arbitrary, but it happened organically and there's something worth preserving about that!

[rz]

It's only gotten worse. Analytic philosophy no longer goes to philosophy, and takes a long path to the awareness path currently.

[adumb_codes]

This was a super cool video (insane editing btw) and interesting analysis! I know first hand how frustrating it can be to work with the Wikipedia data and know this couldn't have been easy