> There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a "classification chain".

I've not heard people talk about it, but it seems like there's a model of information in the Dewey classification system, where 000 includes information systems and general reference itself, then 100 is philosophy, all the way up to 900, which is history. It's something like abstract ("information" to concrete ("real, specific things that happened"). By this theory, it makes sense that moving up the classification chain would take you to Philosophy, if you go far enough. But if that's what was happening, I'd expect it to keep going beyond Philosophy into the 000s.

Maybe, maybe not. Rather than admit my theory is wrong, I'll just pretend that the substrate on which Philosophy articles are built is Wikipedia, the internet, and other information organizing systems. Thus, all Philosophy articles on Wikipedia have an implied link above them in the classification chain. Phew, crisis averted.

The 97% number was true in 2016, but is no longer the case after an edit to Awareness that switched the order of Psychology and Philosophy:

> After an edit to the Awareness article in May of 2024, among others switching the order of Philosophy and Psychology, the amount of articles that lead to Philosophy this way has been greatly reduced, as Awareness and Psychology form a loop of their own.

The title of the actual linked page is "Getting to Philosophy", which should have been the title as submitted.

Edit: someone from this HN thread found a way to break the cycle, so 97% is back for now!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thought&action=...

If the chosen stopping point was some other category, would the percentage be lower? Or is this merely a phenomenon that you can eventually reach any category by repeatedly clicking on the first link?

Okay I will play this game without a crawler. i looked up UFC fighter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khabib_Nurmagomedov. Then you see oh his personal life says he's a Muslim, that leads to islam article, Quran, religious text, religions, Philosophy of religion,Ethics, then philosophy!

Today's featured article, Cyclone Taylor, goes to an Ancient Greek -> Greek Language loop.

Today's top in the news link, Iberian lynx, leads off site (to Wiktionary) on the first link.

I've tried getting to philosophy years ago and it was reliable--but what's up now?

Makes sense, because everything starts with philosophy.

As would 97% of all conversations, if people had the patience, curiosity, and lack of anything immediately productive to do.

Related > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-llumS2rA8I by @not_David

I mean if you keep asking why you eventually get to a point where you hit the limits of human knowledge and then have to make do with subjective opinions aka philosophy.