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 referred to now for re-pop­u­lar­iz­ing the style of Japan­ese “town pop.” Then click on the primary of its hyperlinks (now not relat­ed to the lan­guage of the arti­cle itself), which ends up in Takeuchi’s personal web page. If you happen to stay fol­low­ing that very same professional­ce­dure, you’ll con­tin­ue directly to Town Pop, then Japan­ese Pop Song, then Pop­u­lar Song. Stay drilling down, and also you’ll move the very con­cepts of track and sound, then input the nation-states of physics, the sci­en­tif­ic approach, log­i­cal propo­si­tions, and the phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage. That is one examination­ple professional­vid­ed through the video above from YouTu­ber Now not David, which inves­ti­gates whether or not all roads on Wikipedia even­tu­al­ly result in phi­los­o­phy.

There’s, in fact, 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 once true for 97% of all arti­cles on Wikipedia (includ­ing this one).” As for the remainder, they “result in an arti­cle with­out any out­move­ing wik­ilinks, to pages that don’t exist, or get caught in loops.” That is actu­al­ly the case with the trail get started­ing from “Plas­tic Love,” after Phi­los­o­phy of Lan­guage is going in cir­cles round con­cepts, abstrac­tion, and log­ic itself, nev­er somewhat achieve­ing Phi­los­o­phy prop­er.

Or no less than that’s what hap­pened for me nowadays; it will move dif­fer­ent­ly tomor­row, and even a couple of sec­onds from now. Ever since Wikipedia went are living in 2001, its major dif­fer­ence from oth­er ency­clo­pe­dias has been that it’s con­stant­ly chang­ing, and the speed of that fluctuate has simplest greater over the years. The “phi­los­o­phy recreation,” as Now not David calls it, is all the time sub­ject to damage­age, but additionally to un-break­age. At nor­mal occasions, Orange Juice to Phi­los­o­phy takes thir­youngster steps, Apple Juice to Phi­los­o­phy takes fif­youngster steps; each the Cal­gary Flames and Edmon­ton Oil­ers lie six­youngster steps from Phi­los­o­phy. However issues move hay­cord if some­one is going and, say, re-orders the hyperlinks at the Conscious­ness arti­cle so Psy­chol­o­gy comes first.

These items hap­pen: Wikipedia is, in any case, the ency­clo­pe­dia that any­one can edit. And as you’ll see (no less than as of this writ­ing), Conscious­ness now hyperlinks first to Phi­los­o­phy once more. Those adjustments play hav­oc with the efforts of any­one check out­ing to map out the con­nec­tions between one a part of Wikipedia and anoth­er, as Now not David does on this video. However they don’t regulate the joys­da­males­tal prin­ci­ples of internet­paintings 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 Knowledge Visu­al­iza­tion of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy, 1950–2018

Lis­ten to Wikipedia: A Internet Website That Turns Each and every Wikipedia Edit Into Ambi­ent Song in Actual Time

Philo­graph­ics Items a Visu­al Dic­tio­nary of Phi­los­o­phy: 95 Philo­soph­i­cal Con­cepts as Graph­ic Designs

Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: A Unfastened Route

135 Unfastened Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and huge­casts on towns, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives come with the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Towns and the e-book The State­much less Town: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­e-book.