Mashup developer Jeffrey Winter was thinking about Wikipedia one day and specifically about a rumor that if you followed the first link on any Wikipedia entry that you’d eventually land on the page for Philosophy. So, nerd that he must surely be, he built a web interface to trace this phenomenon and visualize it. The end result is very cool.
Called “All Roads Lead to ‘Philosophy’,” Winter’s mashup tests what he believed to be a reasonable theory and it seems to test well. The fact is that Wikipedia is more regularly structured than one might think and as one commenter on Winter’s post said, most Wikipedia articles begin by saying that the subject of the page is a subset of a larger concept. As you click through those larger and larger concepts, you will eventually hit the ultimate abstraction: philosophy! It’s pretty cool, give it a try.
Article source: RRW http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/wnqguPy6b6A/crazy_mashup_all_things_really_do_come_back_to_phi.php