I found out today that going to any random article and clicking the first link on the page (excluding parenthesis) will always lead you to the Philosophy page. (try it!!!) I found this interesting and wanted to know why. Here's what I came up with. I call it the Network Theory of Abstraction. (That'll be in textbooks in fifty years give or take)
- The first sentence in Wikipedia articles introduces the subject to the reader on the most basic, broad level, that most readers should be familiar with.
- This lends itself to a pattern of increasing abstraction
- Philosophy is the 'end of the line' of abstraction.
Anyway, I just thought this was really, really interesting, and it kind of makes me wonder what other kind of statistical patterns we could find if we could collect and organize all the data on Wikipedia? So at this point you may be asking, "so what"? This is important because no other collection of knowledge has even come close to 1) the sheer volume of information and 2) the internal consistency and inter-correlative nature of Wikipedia's content.
In English: I love Wikipedia.
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