The popover text in today’s XKCD comic reads: Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”.
I started with the first word that came to my mind: Tokyo. Thirty links later, I was at Philosophy.
Give it a try. 93% of all Wikipedia articles lead to Philosophy. There is even some literature on the internet about it (which is the best sentence I’ve written in a while).
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May I interest you in reading a paragraph linking this phenomenon to the fact that our lives are filled with existential questions we all seek answers to; in other words, Philosophy?
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May 31, 2011 at 6:00 am
Jens Timmerman
It seems there’s a group of people trying to keep this so.
f.ex. see this rather unsubtle change:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vehicle&diff=430039885&oldid=429859075
and others in the history of Vehicle…
I found out (using a script I wrote for this: https://github.com/JensTimmerman/scripts/blob/master/philosophy.py) that sometimes loops are introduced, so you don’t arrive at philosophy, but these have a short live life, as people constantly fix them.
(this was before anything of this was posted on xkcd)