Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy

Following the first link in the main text of an English Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually leads to the Philosophy article. In February 2016, this was true for 97% of all articles on Wikipedia (including this one), an increase from 94.52% in 2011. The remaining articles lead to an article without any outgoing wikilinks, to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops. After an edit to the Awareness article in April of 2024, among others switching the order of Philosophy and Psychology, the number of articles that lead to Philosophy this way has been greatly reduced, as Awareness and Psychology form a loop of their own. Since the edit, there had been numerous attempts to switch the order of the links leading to a discussion on the Awareness talk page. However, now, the order has been reverted back so philosophy remains first.



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]?"

Method summarized
Following the chain consists of:
 * 1) Clicking on the first non-parenthesized, non-italicized link within the article body.
 * 2) * Italics (or hatnotes) would cause uninteresting loops such as World Trade Organization linking to WTO (disambiguation) which links back to World Trade Organization
 * 3) * Parentheses would pick up language links that quickly railroad the subject, such as Txorierri line linking to Basque language instead of Narrow-gauge railway
 * 4) * 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.
 * 5) Ignoring external links or red links (links to non-existent pages)
 * 6) 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.

Origins
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 podcast Wikipedia Weekly, which may have been its first public mention.