I wonder if this will affect how people write Wikipedia articles. Will authors start trying to point to something obscure now? It would be neat if the guy went back and did this same analysis in a few months after this sunk into editors brains.
No, this has been a known fact on Wikipedia for years.[1] It has only recently gained mainstream attention after that xkcd comic, but it had been bandied about on reddit and elsewhere long before that. The generally accepted practice on Wikipedia of starting an article with, "[subject] is a [descriptor]? [superclass] that..." means eventually you get broader in scope until you wind up at, surprise surprise, philosophy. Of those articles that don't follow the pattern, the vast majority get stuck in loops. You wouldn't be able to avoid this phenomena without drastically changing how encyclopedic articles are written. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that if you went through a paper encyclopedia and "followed the link" by flipping to the article of the first appropriate word in a given article, you'd see the same pattern emerge.
> Of those articles that don't follow the pattern, the vast majority get stuck in loops.
Are there any articles that don't follow the pattern and don't get stuck in loops? The only way I can see that happening is if the article has no links at all.
You're correct; it would either have to get stuck in a loop or end in an article that had no links. The latter is highly unlikely, except perhaps for some small stub articles that link to another stub. Of the articles that don't link to Philosophy, I'd guess 99.9% would get stuck in loops or have no links to begin with.
Research has also proven that a relatively very small group of contributors actually make most of the changes on Wikipedia, believe it's in the order of about 100 people (can't find the link at the moment). It's well possible that it's a conspiracy, or there's a secret style guide we don't know about.
A small group of contributors make the most edits by count. A diverse group of contributors write the most prose content, usually on a topic that they're expert in. So the core wikipedians are organizing/wikifying/categorizing and that's the bulk of the edits, but the bulk of the content is a different story.
The style guide isn't secret.[1] Also, the research saying that most changes were done by a small group (~1500 way back in the day [2]) was challenged. While the core group of wikipedians are responsible for most of the copyediting, categorizing, etc, the bulk of material additions came from outsiders.[2]
