[LINK] Wikipedia links lead to philosophy

Tom Koltai tomk at unwired.com.au
Tue Jul 12 14:11:43 AEST 2011



> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Jan Whitaker
> Sent: Tuesday, 12 July 2011 11:13 AM
> To: link at anu.edu.au
> Subject: [LINK] Wikipedia links lead to philosophy
> 
> 
> I liked this article:
> 
> http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/the-philos
> ophy-of-wikipedia-20110712-1hbbl.html
> The philosophy of Wikipedia
>   James Ball
> July 12, 2011 - 10:09AM
> 
> 
> Proof that the road to enlightenment can begin with the most trivial 
> subject arrived this month via Wikipedia. Start at any Wikipedia 
> page, then click the first link (ignoring any that are italicised or 
> nestled in brackets), then repeat. For more than 93 per cent of 
> articles, you will end up at philosophy.
>
<SNIP>
 
Surely this is logical. If Philosophy is the root of all Wisdom, then
all wise men must eventually become philosophers.
...and as it is doubtless only wise men that edit Wikipedia, 
...and more persons have access to all publicly known knowledge,
(Wikipedia)
...then all roads must lead to ... Err Socrates, of course.

> This elegant philosophy-at-the-root-of-everything theory has one 
> flaw, though: it works far less well in foreign-language Wikis. As 
> one frustrated Dutch contributor remarked, perhaps it shows that his 
> countrymen "might just think in circles". Alas, it seems not everyone 
> can be as deep as the Essex crew.

I would have thought that we can find the cultural meme behind all
civilisations by carrying out a similar recursive path analysis in all
languages.
So the foregoing paragraph encouraged me to see if Europeans did in fact
think in circular logic constructs.

I'm afraid, it would appear from a test of alternative central and
Eastern European languages (N=4) that none of them would appear to be
very philosophically minded.

The Dutch contributor appears to be correct. Only the English would
appear to be so philosophically minded as to blame Plato's Athenians for
being the tree of all knowledge.

Europeans? They keep looping back ... In other words, Europeans have to
be intelligent enough to know when to get off the mobius curve.
Basically, one could say that an inhabitant from Europe is less likely
to blame Murphy.


TomK






More information about the Link mailing list