Wikipedia talk:Getting to Philosophy

TikTok video
I learned about Getting to Philosophy from this TikTok video. = paul2520 💬 15:55, 7 September 2021 (UTC)


 * This might not be the best forum to discuss anecdotes... Talk page guidelines Adeeta (talk) 21:10, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Me too! I'm very honoured to see people who are just like me. 1204753792 edits (talk) 05:02, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Cited example no longer true?
The section "Method summarized" states that as of Dec 9, 2021, there is a chain from this article (Getting to Philosophy) to the article on Philosophy. This no longer seems to be the case. The article for Fact now seems to lead back to True via the first blue link. I am not experienced enough with wikipedia revisions to know for sure what has changed, but this means that any path to philosophy that goes through the Fact article now ends up in a loop.

This means that the cited example in this article is no longer true. The statistics about the number of articles which eventually lead back to Philosophy are also probably drastically reduced due to this new loop. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.196.231.52 (talk) 00:15, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Edit: the above does appear to be the case, as on Dec 17th a link to True was added in the first line of Fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fact&diff=1060708543&oldid=1052461341 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.196.231.52 (talk) 00:18, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
 * In the truth page, if the links for fact and reality were switched, it would go like this:
 * Truth → Reality → Object of the mind → Object (philosophy) → Philosophy✅
 * 172.112.210.32 (talk) 01:14, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

Philosophy number
I feel like it would be a good idea to say how many pages take 1 click to philosophy or 2 or 3 etc. Maybe the number of clicks it takes to get there would be its philosophy number, with Philosophy being 0 and eg. phenomenon or heirarchy being 1 click away, having a philosophy number of 1

Periodicpro18 (talk) 20:47, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

This applies to this article
Very cool 2600:8800:8C80:2060:925:5291:62E2:8E0C (talk) 09:24, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Longest Path (as of 12/19/22)
So I was putting together a side project about this phenomenon, taking all articles and finding their lengths to Philosophy, and I think I found a contender for the longest path: Parmouti 12. Thanks to the structure of the "Coptic Calendar" pages, it goes from that day backwards through the calendar until it reaches Thout 1, which then links to Coptic calendar due to the next previous link not existing, which then follows a standard route through some religious pages until reaching Philosophy. In total, the path is a whopping 241 articles long! I feel like something of this sort of significance should be encapsulated somewhere in the page, but I'm not sure where it would go, especially since I don't have a source besides my own research. It's especially interesting since the next longest link is from Paoni 12, which is another article about the Coptic calendar, but that's only 61 articles away (since there isn't a page for Parmouti 30).

Interestingly, if each of these articles first linked to Coptic calendar, they would have links of 20. If they instead linked to the page for their month, they wouldn't reach Philosophy at all (they would loop at Mathematics)! JazzHandsIncarnate (talk) 19:49, 19 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Also mildly interesting, the next longest non-Coptic calendar path I could find is from Eochaid Gonnat, at 46 articles long. This path is as long as it is because each of the articles following it start with "X, son of Y", with Y being a link to their parent. JazzHandsIncarnate (talk) 20:27, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Good for the dedication of spending that long clicking links over and over! 12.86.69.234 (talk) 19:36, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Articles that dont lead to philosophy
Ive been following this as a school project, so far i've only found one link that does not lead to philosophy and that is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoline_Hausted as it leads all to dead links, i'm not sure if this counts or not but it would be interesting to see what other pages don't end up at philosophy. 197.159.50.163 (talk) 10:00, 12 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Name -> Referent -> Name is one Clayel (talk) 00:58, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

I must be doing something wrong; I always go back through etymology pages until I end up on Wiktionary instead. Am I breaking the rules? Should I maybe only go to Wikipedia links? --timhortonsconspiracist who is hopeless without the visual editor; go ahead and change this part if you're good at source editing — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.185.8.191 (talk) 22:50, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Getting to Philosophy Phenomenon Gone
I think it doesn't work anymore. Some edits seems to have changed the tail end of this chain, such that most article chains now end up at a loop of Logic -> Logical Reasoning -> Inference -> Reason --> Logic.

Tried many times and still doesn't work. Genius150 (talk) 14:06, 29 May 2023 (UTC)


 * I've also noticed this on some scale, with the loop being Concept -> Abstraction -> Rules of inference -> Logic -> Reasoning -> Conclusion -> Concept Clayel (talk) 00:16, 25 June 2023 (UTC)


 * This isn't new, see Wikipedia talk:Getting to Philosophy/Archive 1. Given constantly-changing article content, loops may appear and disappear over time. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:30, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

Has Psychology taken over this phenomenon?
I tried this on two random articles and ended up at a loop with the Psychology page.

mind - thought - Consciousness - Awareness - Psychology

Started at Gennaro Calì and C8H14O2 also Əliquluuşağı and Sant'Andrea Forisportam, Pisa and Parkhurst (crater) and Logistics specialist and Pat Wellington

each random article I view leads to the Psychology loop.

Brian R Hunter (talk) 21:41, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

GIF idea which might be more explanatory?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Getting_to_philosophy_through_%22Wikipedia_Getting_through_Philosophy%22.gif

I made this gif which I believe might be more visual than the current one. It also uses this very page to demonstrate the effect - might spare some other users the trouble. Wanted rando's thoughts about it and potentially about putting it on the page 87.88.164.141 (talk) 16:44, 17 November 2023 (UTC)


 * It looks good, it would be nice if you made into some kind of file in Wikipedia or Wikimedia commons so it can actually be used. Abdullah raji (talk) 10:39, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Consciousness-Awareness loop
This doesn't seem to be the case anymore, there now seems to be a loop between awareness and consciousness as of 11/27/2023. Even philosophy feeds into this loop. 57.140.28.22 (talk) 20:40, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Phenomenon or end goal?
As I've read through some of these talk page sections, including in the, it's become seemingly apparent that when a page does not meet the criteria for this phenomenon, that page or some page in the chain is edited to rectify that. While at one point this came up and was seen as a "detriment" to Wikipedia, I'm not trying to imply that this is the case this time around, twelve years later. Some changes in this regard, such as this one adding a couple of valid page links before a redlink, can easily be seen as necessary. But it's gotten to the point where I do not think that it can truly be called a "phenomenon", as it does seem to be "rectified" in ways that are not detrimental to the site. It's almost become more of a de facto child project of WP:DEORPHAN. Schiffy (Speak to me &#124;What I've done ) 19:14, 26 December 2023 (UTC)