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    Apples, porcupines, and the most obscure Bob Dylan song – is every topic a few clicks from
    Philosophy? Within Wikipedia, the surprising answer is yes: nearly all paths lead to Philosophy.
    - Mark Ibrahim, Christopher Danforth, & Peter Dodds's (2017, p. 21) 'Connecting every bit of knowledge'

     

     

     

     

    Six Degrees of Francis Bacon


    Nearly all entries in the English edition of Wikipedia lead to Philosophy!

    Philosophy as the highest-ranking article by the number of traversal funnels
    (Ibrahim, Danforth, & Dodds, 2017, p. 27)
    1. Rules of the game:
    2. STEP 1: Select a Wikipedia article at random
    3. STEP 2: Click on the first link in the article that does not appear in parentheses or italics
    4. STEP 3: Repeat STEP 2 for successive articles until you arrive at any of the following:
      1. You reach the Wikipedia page for Philosophy;
      2. You reach a page with no links or a page that does not exist; or
      3. A loop occurs.
    5. STEP 4: Stop

    1. In a majority of the cases, you will eventually arrive at the Wikipedia article on Philosophy!
    2. Wikipedia's First Link Network (FLN) is used to organize and relate information in its many articles
    3. First links flow toward Philosophy as the ultimate anchor, by generalizing from specific to broad
    4. This phenomenon lends support to Wilfrid Sellars' (1962) claim that the aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term

    1. Xefer has designed a tool to test the claim that most (if not all) roads on Wikipedia lead to Philosophy with the following:
    2. The Wikipedia API;
    3. A good graphing package;
    4. JQuery; and
    5. The JavaScript InfoViz Toolkit

      6. Network of nodes for Wikipedia articles with Philosophy as the root node
     

     

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