Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy

Please do not make edits to articles that are motivated by the concepts on this page. Such edits are purely disruptive and are quickly reverted, as they clearly do not improve the encyclopedia.

Following the first hyperlink in the main text of an English Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, historically has usually led to the Philosophy article. The remaining articles led to an article without any outgoing wikilinks, to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops.

History

The phenomenon has been known since at least 26 May 2008, when an earlier version of this page was created by user Mark J. Two days later, it was mentioned in episode 50 of the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, which may have been its first public mention.

In February 2016, the phenomenon was true for 97% of all articles on Wikipedia, an increase from 94.52% in 2011.

After an edit to the Awareness article in April of 2024, switching the order of Philosophy and Psychology, the number of articles that lead to Philosophy this way had been greatly reduced, as Awareness and Psychology formed a loop of their own. In the months after the edit, there were numerous attempts to switch the order of the links leading to a discussion on the Awareness talk page. Following another discussion, the order was changed back in July 2026.

Following discussions like Talk:Mathematics#Hyperlinks missed in the first paragraph about over-linking in the first paragraph of articles, some first links were changed or removed in July 2026. As a result, almost no articles continue to lead to "Philosophy".

Method summarized

Following the chain consists of:

1. Clicking on the first non-parenthesized, non-italicized link within the article body.
   • Italics (or hatnotes) would cause uninteresting loops such as World Trade Organization linking to WTO (disambiguation) which links back to World Trade Organization
   • Parentheses would pick up language links that quickly railroad the subject, such as Txorierri line linking to Basque language instead of Narrow-gauge railway
   • Infobox links should be ignored, with the first infobox link (if applicable) generally being dictated by the structure of the infobox rather than the choices actively made by the authors of the article.
2. Ignoring external links or red links (links to non-existent pages)
3. Stopping when reaching "Philosophy", or a page with no links, or when a loop occurs

Mathematician Hannah Fry demonstrated the method in the 'Marmalade', 'Socks' and 'One Direction' section of the 2016 BBC documentary The Joy of Data.

Theories

There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a "classification chain". According to this theory, the Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines on how to write the lead section of an article recommend that articles begin by defining the topic of the article. A consequence of this style is that the first sentence of an article is almost always a definitional statement, a direct answer to the question "what is [the subject]?".

See also

• Martin's law
• Kruskal's principle
• Attractor
• Small-world network
• Six degrees of separation
• Erdős number
• Wikipedia:Wiki Game
• User:Ilmari Karonen/First link – analysis

References

External links

• A web page that renders links graphically in a tree (detects loops and uses the second link to always complete the process)
• Wikilope is a command line utility and Node.js library that can do various queries on Wikipedia pages, including the get to "Philosophy" effect
• Getting to Philosophy, a Node.js library that allows to query any Wikipedia page and get the different pages names that will get to "Philosophy" (also avoids loops and use the second link)
• A YouTube video demonstrating this observation, which starts with a random article and eventually ends up in the article Philosophy
• Analysis from 2011, showing that over 95% of Wikipedia articles got to Philosophy at that time
• The alt-text of a webcomic at xkcd notes this phenomenon (see tooltip)
• West, Bob [at Wikidata] (2011-05-26). "Wikipedia's fixed point". dlab @ EPFL. Lausanne, Switzerland: Data Science Lab, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Archived from the original on 2022-05-23. Retrieved 2023-09-04.
• WikiLoopr, a tool designed to find loops when following the first link in articles
• "The Only Way Is Essex + Wikipedia = philosophy". The Guardian.
• Lee, Amy (2011-11-14). "All Wikipedia Ends In Philosophy, Literally". The Huffington Post. Archived from the original on 2019-04-02.
• Six Degrees of Wikipedia, an interactive tool to find paths between articles
• Cultural Structures of Knowledge from Wikipedia Networks of First Links, a study that looks at how this phenomenon varies across languages
• A video essay about "The Philosophy Game" and how an edit to Awareness broke it
• What happens if you click the first link on every Wikipedia article?, video about the phenomenon on the official Wikipedia YouTube channel (10 June 2026)